The prince’s tattoos were unique in Charn. The priests had been excited at his birth. Some happy confluence of stars, some strident crying in the language of the newborn had convinced them that he had been a king in Paradise, in another lifetime. Abu looked up. The planet’s silver rim showed beneath some clouds. It could not be true, for Angkhdt had said that all were free in Paradise, free as birds, men and women free and equal, spirits of pure light. There were no kings there. And even if there were, surely a king who had fallen down so far, so heavy with his own sins and misery, should be reborn lower than a farmhand. But the priests had loaded him with obligations and a horoscope that he had carried like a cannonball throughout his childhood—a great general, judge of all men, scourge of heresy. If so, he had thought, and not just he alone, why had God given him so few gifts to accomplish such great aims?

Unathletic, nearsighted, undisciplined, asthmatic: these flaws seemed like sins in a child with such a brilliant future. But eventually he had given up, stopped wondering, and after a while the priests and the parsons also had stopped, admitting their mistake, though the tattoos and the power remained, an embarrassment to them all.

Yet sometimes on clear nights Abu still thought that greatness and strength might descend on him from the sky. At such times he wanted to be alone. He swallowed some of the harsh wine, almost the last. Even the miserable and the cowardly might find a cause to fight for, he thought, and you didn’t have to have a hope of victory to try. That night, watching dancing among these outlaws that he had come to love, not knowing why, he had thought for the first time that he had power he could use to help them.

Paradise was showing now, beautiful and full, silver fruit hanging in a tree of darkness. Abu drank the last of the wine and staggered to his feet. The world heaved and bucked. And as he walked down towards the bridge, and the darkness gave to light, and the quiet gave to screaming noise, and the solitude to angry and demented faces, the wine he had drunk comforted him and made the people dance around him, made the bloodshed and the bullets and the heat seem like hallucinations. In his uniform he felt as invulnerable as a god, because these barbarian rioters were just the men to respect it.

At the bridge, the antinomials had fought among the access ramps, but they had been driven back. The rioters—small men but very numerous, dressed in the yellow clothes of poverty, their faces gutted by the fires of poverty—had pushed them back. Abu Starbridge staggered to the top of a heap of sandbags. He stood there, splendid in his uniform of white and gold, and raised his hand above the throng, his palm shining in the firelight, etched with the golden sun in splendor, the symbol of his inexorable will. Some of the little men stared at him, amazed, some sank to their knees, and some took no notice. His voice, shouting, “Stop! Please stop!” was drowned out in the din.