Sugar Rain (20 page)

Charity wore rubber gloves most of the day, and only took them off in privacy, where she could retouch the greasepaint on her palms and cover them with powder. Among prostitutes it was bad manners to talk about the past; most of the women in the house wore gloves, though of a more expensive kind. But Marcelline was too young to have completely lost her sense of wonder. “Are you a cannibal?” she asked one day, when she had surprised Charity without her gloves. Then she blushed, because it sounded so stupid. But in Charn, in those days, only antinomials had no tattoos.

“No,” said Charity, frowning. She put her gloves back on. She was ironing a pleated shirt and was not sure how to do it. “I am from another country,” she said.

“Where?”

“South of here.”

“Where?” asked Marcelline, and after that she would come every day to hear Charity’s stories. And Charity would tell her stories about the country she was from, south, where the land was rich and it was summer all year round. She told Marcelline about the farm her father owned, and the catbirds, and the elephants, and the wild dogs. She told Marcelline about her seven brothers and her sisters and her mother, who was very fat.

“And did you have a lover there?” asked Marcelline.

“Yes,” said Charity. That day she was ironing the sheets, and she paused for a moment in her work and put the iron up into its stand.

“What was he like?”

Charity ran her glove back through her hair. “He was dark, like me,” she said. “He had a high, pale forehead and long hair,” she said. “He had a beard.”

“Was he handsome?”

“No.” She frowned. “I don’t think so. Or at least—to me he was. He had beautiful hands.”

Often Mr. Taprobane would come down into the laundry, too, to listen to these stories. After a period of sullenness he had become fond of Princess Charity, and often came to help her with her work. Sometimes he brought newspapers for Charity to read aloud: Professor Sabian’s
Free Word
, as well as broadsheets from the Rim. These were full of accusations, rumors of hoarding and profiteering, and every morning they would publish a list of the condemned. Marcelline would lie on the mattress underneath the stairs, dressed in her expensive underwear, while the little man would sit in an untidy heap, twisted around his knees. Fascinated, they would listen as Charity read out the obituaries of princes, soldiers, lawyers, priests. It was practice for her, to see if she could read the names without inflection. But sometimes a description would conjure up a face into her mind, a cousin or a family friend, and then her tongue would stumble. And once she stopped and put the paper down when, in a list of miscellaneous names, she came across this one: “Starbridge, T.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Marcelline. “Sweetheart, what is it?” and she got up and put her arms around her, and held Charity’s face against her breast.

“I don’t know,” whispered Charity. “I just wish I knew sometimes. I just wish I knew for sure.”

Then she looked down, because Mr. Taprobane had gotten up too. He was holding up a flask of whiskey with a solemn expression on his face.

Charity smiled and reached down for it, and that was a mistake. In a little while she felt better. In a little while she was sitting cross-legged, drinking whiskey on the bed with her arm around the cripple’s shoulder. And then she let herself be coaxed upstairs, for drinking made her easy to persuade. “No wonder you’re unhappy,” said Marcelline. “This room would get the best of anyone.”

The laundry had no windows, and it stank of bleach. “No wonder you’re depressed,” said Marcelline. “Look at you, why do you wear such clothes? You’re such a beauty; why do you hide it?”

Though it was dangerously near evening, Charity allowed herself to be coaxed upstairs, and soon she was sitting in Marcelline’s bathroom, while the younger woman cut her hair. “I hate to do it,” Marcelline confided. “It’s beautiful stuff, but not very stylish, unless you keep it clean. Real Starbridge black, we used to call it; not very popular nowadays.”

I deserve a bit of cosseting, thought Charity, and after her haircut she found herself taking a bath in Marcelline’s huge bathtub. Mr. Taprobane had gone back to work, but Charity had barely noticed his departure, her head was so full of liquor. The windows were clouded up with steam, and Charity lay back and let herself be stroked, and rubbed with perfumed oils.

Marcelline was a big girl with a fine, full figure. Her skin was flushed from her exertion, and in the damp air of the bathroom, her hair hung wet around her face. Her legs were naked, and Charity could see her skin through her wet camisole, her nipples and her hair. “The gentlemen would love you, that’s for sure,” she said as she scrubbed Charity’s arms. “I mean it. I don’t understand why—oh my God.”

The girl had scraped her thumbnail along Charity’s palm, and the greasepaint, weakened by the water and the soap, had given way. Charity opened her eyes and jerked herself upright, splashing water on the floor. She tried to pull her hand away, but the girl wouldn’t let go. She was stronger than Charity, and she held Charity’s fingers open while she studied the scrape in the greasepaint that her thumbnail had made. She was staring at the tattoo of the silver rose. Then she let go suddenly and sat back on her heels beside the bathtub, bowing her head and making the gestures of respect.

Charity jumped to her feet. Terrified, she ran into Marcelline’s bedroom, covering her nakedness with a bathrobe of red silk. Then she hurried out into the hall and down the staircase, not thinking and not listening. Otherwise, she would have heard the stamp of heavy boots coming towards her up the stairs. But as it was, she ran down the steps until it was too late, and she saw on the landing below her the figure of a man.

In the middle of the stair she tried to stop herself, clutching at the banister, slipping down onto the steps. Panicked, she turned her head away, not bearing to look as the boots stamped towards her and then stopped. She closed her eyes and did not open them again until she felt a man’s fingers on her chin, gentle and strong, pulling her face around. Then she opened her eyes and found herself staring into the face of a young soldier standing on the step below.

He was dressed in the uniform of the Desecration League, and his fingers were dyed red. The throat of his tunic was closed by a pin in the shape of a child’s hand. He was a handsome man, with a hard, clean-shaven face, and he was smiling. “What have we here?” he asked.

Charity’s forehead was still hot, and her hair and skin were still dripping wet. She had tensed every muscle of her body; one hand held her robe closed, and the other was locked into a tight fist. This was the palm where Marcelline had scratched away the paint, and in her mind Charity uttered a prayer she did not think she knew, when the soldier reached down for her hand and started to caress her fingers, as if to loosen them.

“Please, sir,” she said. “Please, sir, may I go?”

The soldier smiled at her a moment, and then he bowed and stepped aside.

 

A week after this incident on the stairs, Mrs. Soapwood called Charity to her bedroom. By that time she was so pregnant that it was hard for her to move; her arms and legs were bloated, her skin shiny and green. Charity had heard rumors that she could no longer stomach solid food. Charity had heard that she had sent Mr. Taprobane out all over the city, searching for olive oil and mince pie, but then had vomited them up onto her bed.

Charity found these stories easy to believe. Already past the time of any natural confinement, Mrs. Soapwood lay gasping on the bed. The room stank of disinfectant and perfume, but there was another smell underneath those, the smell of something poisonous and sick.

Yet Mrs. Soapwood’s mind seemed clear enough. “A gentleman has come to see me about you,” she said. “He’s been here twice.”

Charity looked around the room. New municipal regulations had forbidden the private practice of religion, yet even so there was a shrine next to the bed. The icons had been removed, but the candles were still burning, and there was a brass bowl full of water, surrounded by framed photographs.

The blinds were drawn, and it was dark. Mrs. Soapwood lay on her side, breathing heavily, while the rain rattled on the windows. “You’re a pretty girl,” she said. “What do you think?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Very well. But think about it. There are worse than he. And it would be easier than the work you’re doing now.”

“I’ve thought about it.”

“Very well. But remember, it wouldn’t have to be what you have seen. I was thinking of something … elegant. Expensive, like a palace. You know the Starbridge language. I’d have them treat you like a princess.”

“No,” said Charity.

“You could wear a veil. You could make the illusion as perfect as you want. Only you would have to use the Starbridge language. That’s why they would come.”

For a moment Charity was afraid that Marcelline had betrayed her. Then she remembered how she had cursed at Mr. Taprobane and pushed him down into the mud. “I don’t know much,” she said. “Mostly abuse. Words I picked up from my mistress.”

“But that’s all you would need. Mostly abuse. That’s why they would come.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Charity. “I’d rather not.”

Mrs. Soapwood turned over onto her back. “Very well,” she said. “Just think about it. I make no demands. Only I would like you to wear some better clothes. Dress as if you worked here. There—I have put some clothes out by the closet. Some of mine. Alter them to fit yourself. I can’t wear them anymore.”

The sheets where she had lain were rumpled and wet. They were thick and made of silk, but they had ridden up along one side to expose an old and rotten mattress stuffed with straw. Mrs. Soapwood groaned and shook her head. “I am very sick,” she said.

Charity came to her and sat down. “It will be over soon.”

“Yes. For better or worse. God help me, I am so afraid. Touch me. Put your hand on me.”

Charity slid her hands underneath the bedclothes. “Touch me!” cried Mrs. Soapwood. “Do you feel anything alive? Do you feel anything struggling? God help me, I have carried life before, and it was not like this.”

Every spring in Charn, with the coming of the rain, there was a plague of monstrous births. According to religious doctrine, this was a natural event. The twenty-seventh bishop had raised six women into sainthood for bearing children to the rain. But in recent generations even the priests had had their doubts. Chrism Demiurge himself had once expressed his skepticism. “I cannot believe that this rain is the literal semen of Beloved Angkhdt,” he had once remarked. His words had provoked riots in the slums.

Nevertheless, there had been no other theory. Books about the sugar children had been violently suppressed. Professor Sabian had spent four months in prison, and on a public scaffold in Durbar Square the priests had made him eat the pamphlet he had written on the subject, page by page. But now all that was different since the change of government. Mrs. Soapwood had a copy of the pamphlet by her bed, annotated and reprinted in an edition of ten thousand. “Sabian,” she said. “Promise me you’ll get me Sabian, when my time comes.”

 

During the first months of the new government, the National Assembly of Charn met in a converted bathhouse behind Wanhope Prison. The building had been abandoned since the end of winter, when it had been one of nine similar facilities. In winter, poor people would come from all over the city to stand naked in the enormous steam rooms, separated by concrete barriers according to their castes. The bishop’s secretary had been afraid that they might freeze to death in their unheated homes.

In warmer weather these bathhouses had been abandoned, and some had already been torn down. The one behind Wanhope Prison had been the largest of the nine, a single great amphitheater of stone, windowless, but domed with milky glass. In it, in November of the eighth phase of spring, the National Assembly had gathered to draft a new constitution. On November 12th, old style, a resolution came before the Board of Public Health, and the four members of the board had put the matter to the full assembly so that they could hear the debate before they voted.

The issue had originally been under the jurisdiction of Professor Sabian, for he was the board member for food and medical distribution. He had hoped to dispose of it quietly, to present the Board of Health with an accomplished fact, but members of the assembly who were hostile to his interests had caught news of it.

That month the assembly was bitterly divided. On the lowest levels of the amphitheater, in a circle around the dais, sat Professor Sabian and his moderates, sober men in dark clothes. Most had been professional men under the old Starbridge regime, clerks and small officials. In the amphitheater they formed a central fortress of middle-class solidity. But they were beleaguered in those days, surrounded by circles of extremists. That month especially, it seemed that every day in the debates, men would leave the lower seats and walk up through the upper benches, to where the followers of Raksha Starbridge sat along the highest edge.

In November the extremists formed the largest single group. They called themselves the Rim. Orange was their color; the delegates wore orange armbands, though many were distinguished better by their loud, strident voices and their drunkenness. Many were from the lowest classes, unused to any power but bitterness, full of a new importance that was breaking them apart.

Among them sat Raksha Starbridge, now called January First. He was slouching in his chair. By his side stood another prominent member of the Rim, a man named Valium Samosir. Still young, he had gained influence in the assembly by the beauty of his voice and his ability to transform the harsh and bitter hatreds of his party into polished words. Outside the assembly, too, he had become famous for his personal beauty. The common people had nicknamed him the Bishop of the Revolution. His austere, noble features were on posters all over the city.

He was just finishing his speech. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Far be it from me to impugn the honesty of any member of this council. Who can forget the first glorious days of our rebellion, when men like Martin Sabian stood alone against the forces of oppression? Who then could have doubted his patriotism, when he first raised the standard of revolt in Durbar Post Office? What man among us does not love him—let him dare to raise his hand. Who does not love him for his kindness, his compassion, his steadfast courage in the people’s fight? No one has loved him more than I. Even now I find it hard to raise my voice against him.