Sugar Rain (36 page)

One day Jenny came to Thanakar, shaking with urgency, and she showed him a drawing of a small town below a hill—dilapidated stone houses on a single street. And there were horsemen coming down out of the hills, carrying the flags of the League of Desecration: a child’s red hand upon an orange ground. In the cellar of a farmer’s house, Princess Charity crouched under some bags of straw, her face hidden in shadow.

Thanakar was good with numbers. He made some calculations with the numbers in the margin. He was acute enough to understand them, partly. He was acute enough to understand that this was something that was happening at that exact moment in the landscape of Jenny’s mind, perhaps a hundred miles to the south and west. But more than that he couldn’t understand.

Though he could not bring himself to follow any of their advice, Thanakar was still taking her to various psychiatrists around the town. On the morning of November 66th, he stood out in the slowly settling rain, in the courtyard of a block of offices in the Avenue of Bliss. Jenny was undergoing a second battery of tests inside, in the office of a doctor that specialized in clairvoyance.

The results of the first test had been confusing. The psychologist had come out to Thanakar as he was pacing the halls. She was carrying a sheaf of papers.

“How did she do?” Thanakar had asked.

She had done badly. The psychologist explained. “Look. This is a test in which she tries to guess the card that I am holding in my hand. Out of ninety times, she couldn’t do it once.”

“Well, that tells you something, doesn’t it?”

“You don’t understand. There are only four choices—a circle, a cross, a square, and a dog’s head. A normal person, answering at random, should achieve a score of twenty-five percent. To fail on every question, that is remarkable.”

The psychologist had asked him to bring Jenny back to be retested. He had taken time away from work and come down through the crowded streets. In those days every hour brought more refugees to Caladon, sixty thousand in that week alone. Pushing through the streets, Thanakar felt new currents of resentment and unrest, and there were soldiers everywhere.

The refugees were all his countrymen. In Charn the National Assembly had banned the practice of religion. In the first weeks of November, soldiers of the Desecration League rode out into the countryside of Charn, smashing shrines and killing priests. Always they were preceded by waves of refugees, the faithful and fanatical, the wealthy and well born. Two hundred thousand refugees had cut the knot of the unravelers and crossed the border into Caladon.

When Thanakar had first come into the city underneath the Argon Gates, he had been one of a small number, for most were held at the frontier. But each day after that there had been more: Starbridges on horseback and in carriages, crowding the hotels and the restaurants. And they were followed by an endless stream of poorer folk, beggars on the road, crossing the soda plains with their pots and pans upon their heads, pushing wheelbarrows piled high with kettles and with clothes.

At first there had been room for them in the capacious streets of Caladon, but on the forty-second of November, the Argon gates were closed by orders of the king to all but the most influential. Under the walls the people camped in plywood shelters and under sheets of corrugated iron. Thanakar had found work in a miserable shantytown strung out along the red-brick battlements. A gynecologist from Caladon had staffed a clinic there; she was a priest of Angkhdt, and required no certificate. She and sixteen nuns had built a new dispensary in an abandoned brickyard. Under canvas shelters the sick lay in concentric circles, arranged according to disease.

Thanakar had read about this doctor in the papers, which otherwise were full of xenophobia and hate. In the fourth week of November he had crossed the barbed-wire checkpoint, to work among his countrymen. And while the gynecologist delivered sugar children, and the nurses and the nuns distributed fresh water and first aid, Thanakar was put in charge of seven patients.

Soon he had them taken up, and taken to a separate tent, where their ravings would not harm the others. For it was at that time, among the Charnish refugees, that the first cases of a new and strange disease were diagnosed. Later it would devastate whole dioceses. But it was first observed by Dr. Thanakar Starbridge, in the camp at Kethany, and he called it black brain fever. In his diary from that time he described the symptoms—melancholia, followed by hallucinations, and then by catatonia. Death came rapidly, sometimes in a few days, and when the skulls of the corpses were split open, it was found that their brains were black and rotten, almost liquid in their cases.

In his diary for the sixth week of November, Dr. Thanakar made a note of his own feelings, when he was working with these patients. He was sick at heart. He feared that in his daughter he was seeing a slow progress of the same malady. It was for this reason that he took off time from work, to bring Jenny to all the specialists in Caladon, to try to find some clue. In the office of one alienist, an old, obese woman with sunken eyes and a slow voice, he had heard for the first time a theory that was later to become famous.

“I believe you,” the alienist had said. Her voice was slow, without being particularly rich or deep. “I believe you. The conditions are related, that is clear. I have heard of this brain fever. It is contagious, is it not?”

“I don’t know. How could it be?”

“How, indeed? I am summarizing what you told me. But perhaps your patients catch this illness from your hands.”

“No,” said Thanakar. “How can you say that? In most cases, death comes in sixty hours.”

“And do none survive?”

“Yes. Some do. In some the symptoms have been less acute.”

“And these survivors, do they have anything in common? Do they have anything in common with your daughter?”

“I don’t know,” said Thanakar miserably. “Two are out of danger, but they have suffered terrible brain damage.”

The alienist wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Let us look at this another way,” she said. “You love your daughter, do you not?”

“Very much. Of course I do.”

“Have you considered, perhaps, that it is love that is keeping her alive?”

“I take good care of her.”

“I’m not talking about that. Perhaps you take good care of all your patients. I’m talking about love. I mean as medication, not as therapy.”

“I don’t understand.”

Like most Caladonians, the alienist had disgusting manners. She blew her nose onto her hand and then rubbed her palms together. “Let me put it another way,” she said. “This spring every patient that I see is starved for love. I don’t mean that in a sentimental way. I mean it is a hunger that is killing them, a function of the weather and the insecurity of life. In summer we have other epidemics—surfeits and venereal diseases—not like this. But one full year ago, in spring, there was a devastation on our eastern coast that forced the evacuation of twenty fishing villages. It sounds similar to the fever you describe.”

“It was not the same,” said Thanakar.

“It was a fever that killed many. At that time philosophers first speculated about the cause.”

“No, it is ridiculous,” interrupted Thanakar. “I have read the history, and it is not the same. If love were medicine, my daughter would be well.”

“At that time, Saint Carilon Bargee first speculated as to the cause,” continued the woman, frowning. “He said there were many kinds of love. He compared it to a source of light. He said if we could manage to break love apart into its component elements, the way a prism breaks apart a beam of light, then we could have a panacea for all ills. If you could find the precise type of love that would most benefit your daughter… . It is not sexual love, I feel sure.”

“No?” cried Thanakar, furious, his voice full of sarcasm and rage. “I don’t see why not. Didn’t I tell you that in Charn she had been terribly abused? Perhaps she feels the lack of it. Besides,” cried Thanakar, “don’t tell me about Carilon Bargee. He was a lunatic. Didn’t he poison himself with his own serum, an injection that was supposed to duplicate the feel of being loved? He set his skin on fire.”

“He was before his time,” the alienist had said.

Now, standing in the courtyard on the 66th day of November, waiting for the results of Jenny’s second test, Thanakar again felt some of his anger. All psychiatrists were fools, he thought. They inhabited a realm of darkness and ate despair like food. What was the alternative? thought Thanakar.

He was standing in the courtyard of a block of psychiatric offices, staring at the rain. The courtyard he had found by chance, searching for a toilet. A pair of doors had given way into an open space, a garden surrounded by windowless, white walls, where the sugar drifted down like snow. It was a rock garden: round, white pebbles like the tiny eggs of some small bird were raked in swirls around a central pile of rocks. Nothing grew. Nevertheless it was a restful place. The arrangement of the rocks was pleasing to the eye. Thanakar stood on a path of polished stones, next to a tiny spirit house of bronze.

Across from him, at the other end of a raked path, there was a marble bench set into the wall. On it sat a boy, young and handsome, with a thin, high-boned, delicate face. He was richly dressed in a uniform of blue and gold, the mark of the highest of the six varieties of Caladonian Starbridge. But the sleeves of his uniform had been extended past his hands, and they had been tied behind him, so that he sat hugging himself as if against the cold. He was staring down at the gravel in front of him, and with the toe of his boot he was obliterating the careful marks of the rake.

He kicked at the gravel with his foot, digging a trough down to the bare earth. He jerked his head back and noticed Thanakar for the first time. Instantly his face took on a look of bitter scorn, and his fine black eyebrows drew together. “Well,” he said, “What are you staring at? You also, have you come to laugh at me?”

Thanakar found this question hard to answer. Involuntarily he glanced around the little garden, though he knew they were alone.

But the stranger had a way of speaking that Thanakar, though he had used it often, had never heard addressed to himself—a phraseology pitched from high to low, as if he, Thanakar Starbridge, had been a jeweler or a slave. The stranger’s voice was thick with drugs, and the contempt in it was almost palpable, like spittle on the doctor’s face.

The doctor made a gesture in the air, one of the ninety-seven gestures of self-revelation. But the boy had already dropped his head. As he did so, Thanakar realized who he was.

The king of Caladon had had two sons. The younger one was still an infant, a strange, misshapen boy, the source of many rumors. The elder had been grown when the younger was born—a popular, erratic prince, a drinker and carouser, a singer and a poet. Many nights when he was growing up, he would slink down from his cold palace, fooling the ancient priests who were his teachers and his guardians with a series of preposterous disguises. Alone or with a few companions, he would pass the night among the brothels and the wineshops of the lower town. Enraged, his father had sequestered his allowance, and even at one time had locked him naked in his room, but he had always managed to escape. Once Craton Starbridge, his best friend, had held a ladder to his window, and he had come down in borrowed clothes to be among his people. Poor folk came from miles around to be with him and hear him sing. His poems were on everybody’s lips—long songs, drinking songs, songs of harsh captivity. In the brothels of the lower town the prostitutes tied silken scarves to the posts of their beds, to show that he had been there.

But on the first day of July, in the eighth phase of spring, Prince Argon Starbridge had been born in Caladon Cathedral, and five days later the king had disinherited his elder son. A crowd of fifty thousand had marched in protest all the way from Starbridge Covenant to the cathedral, carrying signs and banners, and wicker cages full of pigeons and white doves. But on the steps of the cathedral, the queen had met them, heavily veiled, with her newborn baby in her arms. There she had shown the child to the multitude, and they had gone down on their knees.

And after that the troubles of the elder prince had been forgotten. He was convicted of insanity—a long list of mental maladies that had been dormant in his mother’s family—and imprisoned in a lunatic asylum. In the city, new violence and epidemics claimed public attention. The Peacock Prince, as he was called, Samson Mantikor was soon forgotten, though his songs were everywhere. And in the brothels certain combinations of solicitude were still named after him: the pigeon’s tail, for example, the flutter of wild wings.

Now, in his royal straightjacket, he leaned back against the stone wall of the courtyard and wagged his handsome head from side to side. It had been five months since his first incarceration, and his hair had grown down past his shoulders. It was dusted with rough sugar, and there was sugar on his knees and on his boots. Ignoring Thanakar, he was humming a tune to himself, a tune then popular in Caladonian dancehalls:

To the wings of the wild dove,
The winds and rocks are cruel.
I have been battered without cease,
By flatterers and spies.

“I am not here to laugh at you,” said Thanakar angrily, at last. “I came this way by chance.” He used the tone of discourse between equals, as was his birthright, and at the sound of it, Samson Mantikor raised up his head.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “The door was locked.”

“It was not locked,” retorted Thanakar. “I came this way by chance.”

The prince stared at him keenly and then got to his feet. “Come, then,” he said. “If you are not a liar, come loose my hands. Your voice is strange to me. Who are you?”

“I am from Charn,” said Thanakar, limping forward across the narrow courtyard, holding up his palm. And when the prince saw the tattoo of the golden briar wrapped around the doctor’s finger and down his wrist and forearm, some of the hostility left his face, and his eyes took on a look of sober calculation.