Agamemnon's Daughter (18 page)

The messenger also said that the pestilential air that this pile of heads exhaled was so unbearable that for the first time in its existence the Wall had apparently contracted, and the messenger had prayed to God that the rebuilding work which had been launched at such an opportune moment should be completed as quickly as possible.

The messenger’s tale left us all utterly depressed. Without admitting it to ourselves, we were aware that we would henceforth cast a quite different eye on the Wall’s damaged parts, on its cracks and crumbly patches. Our minds obstinately kept turning toward the pile of severed heads. Once the messenger had left, my deputy pointed out that the wise old saying “Skull on stone breaks nothing but bone” — a phrase whose brushstrokes we mastered at primary school thanks to our teacher’s liberal use of the rod — had become obsolete. The way things looked now, heads seemed more likely than anything else to be the weapon of choice against the Wall.

No troop movements on the border. A brutal earthquake has shaken everything except the Wall, which has long known how to cope with seismic disturbances. The silence that reigned after that last shock subsided seemed deeper than ever. . . I have the impression that the rebuilding work is being done none too carefully and just for show. The day before the quake, the building used as a watchtower, on our right, collapsed again, after having already been erected twice. It all leads me to think that treason has crept into the imperial palace. My deputy has a different view. He has long been convinced that people in the capital are so deeply immersed in pleasure and debauchery that few of them ever think of the existence of nomads and frontiers. Only yesterday he was telling me that he’d heard people say that a new kind of mirror has been invented — mirrors that more than double the size of a man’s penis. Ladies take them into their bedchambers to arouse themselves before making love.

Our only comfort is that there doesn’t seem to be the slightest movement on the other side of the Wall, except for a few scouts who flash past on horseback now and then, and sometimes we also see small groups of ragged Turkish soldiers. When, toward the end of summer, the Turks first appeared, our lookouts were terribly alarmed. Our first thought was that they might be attack units disguised as defeated Turks, but then we got reports from spies who had infiltrated them that they were in fact the remnants of the Ottoman army Timur had routed at Chubukabad. They’ve been wandering up and down the frontier for a long time now. Most of them are old men, and, when evening comes, their thoughts go back to those distant lands with fearsome names where they fought, and also presumably to their Sultan Bayazed, whose memory trails with them across the steppe like a dead flash of lightning.

More than once they asked for work on the Wall restoration project; after the repeated collapses of the right-hand tower, one was so persistent he actually got to see me personally and told me in bad Chinese that he’d once seen in a far distant land a bridge in one of whose pillars a man had been immured. He pointed to his eyes as he swore that he had really
seen
it, and even asked for a scrap of cardboard so he could draw the shape of the bridge for me. It was only a small bridge, he said, but to stop it from collapsing a sacrifice had to be made. How, then, could this huge Wall of China remain standing without an offering of the same kind?

He came back to see me a few days later and told the same story once more, but this time he made a lavishly detailed drawing of the bridge.

When I asked him why he’d pictured it upside down, he turned pale. “I don’t know,” he replied, “perhaps because that’s the way it looks in the water. . . Anyway, the night before last, that’s how I saw it in my dream. Upside down.” After he left, we took some time to look at his bizarre sketch. He explained that the symbol † marked the place of the sacrifice. After I stared at it hard for a long while, I thought I could see the bridge beginning to quiver. Or was that because the Turk had told me that he remembered the bridge’s reflection in the river better than the bridge itself? If I may say so, it was a way of seeing things from an aquatic point of view — a perspective, the Turk had explained, thought to diverge completely from a human point of view, for instance, or from a so-to-speak
terran
perspective. It was the waters that had demanded the sacrifice of immurement (at least, that’s what the legend said) — that is to say, sentencing a man to death.

Late that night, slanting beams of moonlight falling on the masonry made human shapes appear here and there on the side of the Wall. “Accursed Turk!” I swore under my breath, believing it was he who had stirred up such morbid images in my mind. It then struck me that the upturned bridge was perhaps the very model of the way tidings good and bad move around our sublunar world. It was very likely that nations did indeed pass messages to each other in that way — signals announcing the coming of their official delegations, with their letters sealed with black wax, a few hundred or a few thousand years in advance.

Nomad Kutluk
The chiefs have gathered at the
kurultai,
and Khan Timur’s
yarlik
has come: “Never venture over the other side,” it says, “for that ways lies your perdition.” But the more I’m told not to, the more I want to step over and see the cities and the women who are doubled in burnished glass, wearing nothing but a gauze they call
mend-afsh
(silk), women with a pleasure-slit sweeter than honey, but this damned rock heap won’t let me, it obstructs me, it oppresses me, and I would like to stab it with my dagger, though I know steel has no power over it, for it even withstood the earthquake only two days ago. When the shuddering earth and the masonry were wrestling with each other, I screamed aloud to the quake, “You’re the only one that can bring it down!” But it made no difference, the Wall won out, it smothered the quake, and I wept as I watched the earthquake’s last spasms, like a bull who’s had its throat cut, until, alas, I saw it expire, and my God, did I feel sad, as sad as that other time in the plain of Bek-Pek-Dala, when I said to the commander, Abaga, “I don’t know why, but I feel like screaming,” and he said, “This steppe is called Bek-Pek-Dala, the steppe of hunger, and if you don’t feel your own hunger, you’ll feel the hunger of others, so spur your steed on, my son.” That’s what they all tell me: spur your steed on, never let it stop, son of the steppe, but this lump of stone is stopping me, it’s in my way, it’s rubbing up against my horse, it’s calling to its bones, and I myself feel drawn in to its funereal mortar, I don’t know how, but it’s made my face go ashen, it’s making me melt and blanch, aaah . . .

Inspector Shung
The days drag along as wearily as if they had suddenly been broken by old age. We haven’t yet managed to recuperate from the shock we had suffered at the end of this week.

Ever since his chariot halted at our tower and he said, “I am from Number 22 Department of Music,” I have felt a foreboding of evil, or something very much like it. When I asked him what the role of his department was and whether he really meant to put on concerts or operatic pieces for the soldiers and workers on the Wall rebuilding project, he laughed out long and loud. “Our Department hasn’t been involved in that sort of thing for ages!” What he then explained to us was so astounding that at one point my deputy interrupted him with a plaintive query: “Is all that really true, or is this a joke?”

We had of course heard that, over the years, some departments and sections of the celestial hierarchy, while retaining their traditional names, had seen their functions entirely transformed — but to learn that things had gone so far as to make supplying the emperor with sexual performance-enhancing drugs the main job of the navy’s top brass, while the management of the fleet was now in the hands of the palace’s head eunuch, well, nobody could easily have got their mind around that. But that’s not the whole story, he said. “Do you know who’s now in charge of the copper mines and the foundries? Or who’s the brains behind foreign policy these days? Or the man in charge of public works?”

Our jaws dropped as, with smug satisfaction at his listeners’ bewilderment, he answered his own questions, as if he were throwing old bones to hungry dogs, Lowering his voice, he confided that the institution now responsible for castrating eunuchs and for running the secret service was the National Library. Leaving us no time at all to catch our breath, he went on to reveal that in recent times the clan of the eunuchs at the imperial palace had seized an untold amount of power. In his view they might soon be in complete control of government, and then China might no longer be called the Celestial Empire, or the Middle Empire, but could easily come to be known as the Empire of Celestial Castration . . .

He guffawed for a while, then his face darkened. “You may well laugh,” he said, “but you don’t realize what horrors that would bring in its wake.” Far from smiling, let alone laughing, our expressions had turned as black as pitch. Despite which, he went on prefacing all his remarks with “You may well laugh, but . . .” In his mind, we were laughing without realizing the calamity that would come of it. Because we did not know that emasculation multiplies a man’s thirst for power tenfold, and so on.

As the evening wore on, and as he drank ever more copiously, especially toward the end, the pleasure of lording it over us and his pride in coming from the capital pushed him to reveal ever more frightful secrets. He probably said too much, but even so none of his words was without weight, for you could sense that they gave a faithful representation of reality. When we broached the threat from the north, he snorted with laughter as thunderously as ever before. “War with the nomads? How can you be so naÏve, my poor dear civil servants, as to believe in such nonsense? The Wall rebuilding project? It’s got nothing to do with the prospect of battle! On the contrary, it’s the first article of the secret pact with the Barbarians. Why are you looking at me with the glassy stare of a boiled cod? Yes, that’s right, the repair work was one of the Barbarians’ demands.”

“Oh, no!” my deputy groaned, as he put his head between his hands.

Our visitor went on in more measured manner. To be sure, China had raised the Wall to protect itself from the nomadic hordes, but so much time had passed since then that things had undergone a profound change.

“Yes,” he said, “things have changed a lot. It’s true China was afraid of the Barbarians for many a long year, and at some future time she may well have reason to fear them again. But there have also been periods when the Barbarians were afraid of China. We’re in one such period right now. The Barbarians are afraid of China. And that’s why they asked, quite firmly, for the Wall to be rebuilt.”

“But that’s crazy!” my deputy said. “To be afraid of a state and at the same time ask it to strengthen its defenses makes no sense at all!”

“Heavens above!” our visitor exclaimed. “Why are you so impatient? Let me finish my explanation . . . You stare at me with your big eyes, you interrupt me like a flock of geese, all because you don’t know what’s at the bottom of it. The key to the puzzle is called: fear. Or to be more precise, it is the nature of that fear . . . Now, listen carefully, and get it into your heads: China’s fear and the Barbarians’ fear, though they are both called
fear
in Chinese, are not the same thing at all. China fears the destructive power of the Barbarians; the Barbarians fear the softening effects of China. Its palaces, its women, its silk. All of that in their eyes spells death, just as the lances and dust of the nomads spell the end for China. That’s how this strange Wall, which rises up as an obstacle between them, has sometimes served the interests of one side, and sometimes the other. Right now it’s the nomads’ turn.”

The thought of insulting him to his face or calling him an impostor, a clown, and a bullshitter, left my mind for good. Like everything else he’d said so far, this had to be true. I had a vague memory of Genghis Khan’s conquest of China. He overthrew our emperors and put his own men in their place, then turned on those same men because they had apparently gone soft. Had Yan Jey, one of our ministers, not been convicted a few years back for having asserted, one evening after dinner, that the last four generations of the Ming dynasty, if not its entire ascendance as well, were basically Mongol?

So the repairs to the Wall had been requested by the Barbarians. Timur, with more foresight than his predecessors, had decided that invading China was not only pointless but impossible. What China loses by the sword it retakes by silk. So Timur had chosen to have the border closed, instead of attacking. This is what explains the calm that settled over both sides of the Wall as soon as the delegation came over. What the rest of us had ascribed so unthinkingly to an enigma, to frivolousness, even to a hallucination engendered by penis-enlarging mirrors, was actually the straightforward outcome of a bilateral accord.

That night a swarm of thoughts buzzed in my head. States are always either wiser or more foolish than we think they are. Snatches of conversation with officials who had been posted on the other side came back to me, but I now saw them in a different light. The ghost of Genghis Khan has weakened, I used to hear from people who’d carried out espionage in the northlands. But we heard them without paying much attention, telling ourselves: These are just tales of the Barbarians. They’ve gone softer, then become hardened again, and taking that sort of thing seriously is like trying to interpret the shapes made by flights of storks in the sky. But that was not right at all. Something really was going on out there on the gray steppe, and the more I thought about it the more important it seemed. A great change was taking hold of the world. Nomadism was on its last legs, and Timur, the man whom the heavens had had the whimsy to make lame, was there to establish a new balance of power. He had brought a whole multitude of peoples to follow a single religion, Islam, and now he was trying to settle them in a territory that could be made into a state. The numerous incursions of these different nations, which had previously seemed incomprehensible, would now probably come to a halt on the surface of the earth, though it was not at all clear whether that was a good thing or bad, since you can never be sure whether a Barbarian contained is more dangerous than one let loose . . . I imagined Timur standing like a pikestaff at the very heart of Asia and all around him nomadic peoples barely responding to his exhortations to stop their wild forays . . .