Soldiers of Paradise Read Online Free Page A

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