The Caryatids

Radmila managed to wriggle sideways in her bondage. She got her knees up, her legs up.

The foaming tide would not drown her until it reached the coffin.

The tide rose steadily. The coffin began to float.

PART THREE

SONJA

The Gobi desert

HE WAS BOWLEGGED, he had lice, internal parasites, and tubercular lesions, and he was nineteen years old. His life was one long epic poem about heat, cold, thirst, hunger, filth, disasters, and bloodshed. His fellow tribesmen called him "the Badaulet," which meant "Lucky."

Sonja tuned her clinic lights to a mellow glow and turned up the infrasound. Lucky's tough, tireless, scrawny body went as translucent as glass. His sturdy heart jetted blood through the newly cleansed nets of his lungs.

Sonja had killed off Lucky's parasites, filtered his blood, changed his skin flora, flushed out his dusty lungs and the squalid contents of his guts…She had cut his hair, trimmed his nails…He was a desert warlord, and every pore, duct, and joint in him required civilizing.

"Lucky dear," she said, "what would you like more than anything in this whole world?"

"Death in battle," said Lucky, heavy-lidded with pleasure. Lucky always said things like that.

"How about a trip to Mars?"

Lucky stoutly replied-according to their machine translation: "Yes, the warrior souls are bound for Heaven! But men must be honest with Heaven and rise from the front line of battle! For if we want to go to the garden of Heaven, yet we have not followed in the caravan of jihad, then we are like the boat that wants to sail on the dry desert!"

"Mars is a planet, not Heaven. It's a planet like Earth."

"Even a pagan woman with your pitiful ignorance can follow the path of jihad!" said Lucky, grunting a little as her oiled fingers readjusted the bones in his neck. "Women can equip a man for righteous battle with their gold and jewelry!"

"I have no gold or jewelry."

Lucky reached out deftly and seized a thick hank of her hair. "Then cut and sell these golden tresses! Your beauty will buy me guns to punish all of Heaven's enemies!"

"What a sweet thing to say."

There was no use her denying it, especially to herself: she had fallen for him. He was a dismal, bloodstained creature from what was surely one of the worst areas on Earth, yet he radiated confidence and a sure sense of manly grace.

This was not another impulsive fling, though Sonja had never lacked for those. This time was one of those serious times.

Maybe she had fallen, somehow, for their quirky machine translation, for Lucky's native tongue was an obscure pidgin of Chinese, Turkic, and Mongolian dialect, a desert lingo created by the roaming few who still survived in the world's biggest dust bowl. It was the trouble of reaching him, of touching him, that made their pang of communion so precious to her. Talking to Lucky was like shouting through an ancient crack in the Great Wall of China.

She felt a powerful, deeply spiritual rapport with him, for once she had been so much like him: young, bewildered, foreign, aggressive, and heavily armed. In China, yet not quite of China. For this young war hero to become an honored guest of the Chinese state-he must have waded here through a tide of gore.

Sonja disentangled his callused fingers from her curls. "Lucky, you feel some pain here, don't you?" She patted him intimately.

"Yes, that is a pain in my ass."

"I will fix that for you." He'd fallen-from a horse, most likely-and his cracked fourth lumbar vertebra had a growth on it, a tender, frilly, ligamentous benign tumor like some Chinese wood-ear mushroom. People's interior organs-and Sonja had spent years studying them-they were subaquatic organisms, basically. They grew in bloody seawater.

"Stop fixing me, Sonja. You fix me too much."

"Dear Badaulet, that big pain you feel down your leg comes from one small broken bone on your back. It is right…here. Do you feel that? Here it is: that is your pain. Because there is a network of nerves there. The network is pinched, the network has a fault. See how I can touch that network fault? My fingers can feel that."

"No, no! Stop that! My back is strong! It's my stupid ass that has the pain." Lucky twisted his neatly trimmed head, showed her his newly polished teeth and smiled. "Rub me all over, slowly, as you did before. That part is good."

"Lucky: You are strong and beautiful, but I know your body better than you. I know what you feel."

"Stop dreaming! You can't tell me what I feel, woman! Only Heaven knows the secrets hidden in the breasts of men!"

"Oh, I know enough of your secrets to heal you as a man." She lowered her eyes. "That will hurt at first."

"Oh woman, why do you always talk so much? I know what you want from that bold, rude way you look at my face! You can't hurt me! You and your sweet little hands…" Lucky grabbed snakelike at her fingers, and missed them as she instantly snatched them back.

He really didn't think that she could hurt him. Of the many outlandish things that Lucky had said to her, this one was the most absurd.

The Badaulet was an outcast, although he was entirely sure he was a prince. She had once thought she was a princess, and become an outcast…"Badaulet, this evening I will bathe you, and dress you in your fine new uniform. You will meet the greatest heroes in the whole world." Grappling his arm, she coaxed him over onto his belly, so that his spine was exposed.

"Who is that, what did you say to me?" Lucky touched his translation earpiece and frowned.

"Your banquet hosts in Jiuquan tonight are the taikonauts! The astronauts! The cosmonauts! The taikong ren. The yuhangyuan. The hang-tianyuan. Do you understand that? I mean the Chinese heroes who flew to Mars and returned to Earth."

"Oh yes, the famous Great Pilgrims to Heaven. I understand. They mean to honor the Badaulet for my valor in combat."

"To meet these heroes brings great good fortune. They are the future!"

"Did your men of valor fight on Mars?"

"No. They collected rocks there."

"Though they have returned from Heaven, if they failed to fight the jihad they have earned no merit."

Sonja planted the point of her elbow into Lucky's spine, and with one decisive lunge she ripped the tumor loose.

The Badaulet gasped in agony and writhed like a hooked fish.

"You felt that pang all down your leg, didn't you?"

He was angry. "You hurt me now! You cut my hair! You washed my guts! You stole my clothes! You burned me with hot wax! And I'm no better, Sonja! I hurt! You promised you would fix me and I hurt."

Sonja rolled him over onto his back. For the first time since she had met him, Lucky had gone gratifyingly limp. Normally he was as nervous and tensile as a bundle of barbed wire. His torn spine was bleeding a little, inside of him. Not too much. She had done it precisely right.

What amazing skin this boy had. There were hen-scratched scars all over him, pits, pocks, frostbite, dimples…"Lie quiet now…Rest and heal…Shall I sing to you while I make you feel better? I'll sing you a little song. I know many old and beautiful songs. I will sing you 'The Ballad of the Savage Tiger. "

As she sang, Sonja suited actions to his needs. The springy, salty vitality of the masculine body, how endearing that was. The body was irrepressible, it wanted to live despite everything. The sexual body, with resources for new life.

Sonja had come to treasure poetry, during the long marches between flaming cities. On the deadly, broken roads of a China in chaos, in the teeming refugee camps, she had come to understand that a memorized poem was true wealth-it was a precious work of art, a possession that could not be burned or stolen.