Kalpa Imperial (17 page)

“Yes,” said the empress, “I never get angry any more, and when night comes I’m tired out. No more foolish talk now. Good night.”

And the Streets Deserted

The storyteller said: The emperor decreed that a city be founded. There were countless cities in the Empire: sacred cities, industrial cities, warrior cities, forbidden cities, wise ones, monstrous ones, maritime, ruined, hidden, licentious, stinking, forgotten, nascent, damned, peaceable, and dangerous cities. But the emperor, fourth of the Kiautonor dynasty, was a lascivious and ostentatious man. Recently he had purchased, in a town on the border of the Southern lands, some went so far as to say in a village on an island deep in the heart of the South, this last being improbable for reasons known to all, a new concubine. An Assistant (Third Class) of the Inner Chamber reported, before they pulled out his teeth, cut off his tongue, and sent him to beg in the streets of the port as a traitor, that the girl was very young girl, dark, thin, and that she was shut up in a windowless, lampless building in an hexagonal pavilion in the Garden of the Three Black Tyrants, and given nothing to eat but wild joca meat and chopped rafilia stalks to keep her lively and ardent. People believed him because nobody had seen her, although everybody heard her screams, night after night and sometimes in daytime, which confirmed the rumor, already become legend, concerning the immense size of the emperor’s member, and the other rumor that never did become a legend concerning the almost abnormal smallness of the girl. And the emperor, fourth of the Kiautonor dynasty, decided one day to leave the Empire a monument to this acquisition which had given him so much pleasure, and so decreed that a city be founded. He called into his presence one autumn morning a certain minister, to whom, scorning protocol and hierarchies, he gave the order, talked a bit about beauty, briefly, since he wasn’t familiar with the subject, described more by gestures than by words how monumental and imposing it was to be, sent the functionary off, and almost immediately forgot about the city which didn’t yet exist.

The functionary, a nobleman, a hard worker, a widower, an unbeliever, aged by attacks of Ohmaz’s Disease, was the Minister of Aerial Cults as well as being temporarily in charge of the Rites of the Flame since the death of the Priestess, possibly by suicide. His name was Senoeb’Diaül, and he knew nothing about cities. For which reason he brought together in his office an architect, an engineer, a sculptor, a geographer, a painter, an astronomer, a mathematician, a storyteller, a general, and a priest, and told them what their job was: By summer, the city must be built, resplendent, magnificent, and inhabited.

We will not go into details (said the storyteller) about the preparatory work, which like any project in its first stages was confused and uncertain, so that reading the reports aggravated the illness of the nobleman Senoeb’Diaül, each attack becoming longer and more frequent. We will say only that on the first morning of winter the expedition set off to found and build the city that would bear the name of the little, young, dark-skinned concubine, who by the way was already dead, destroyed by fever and injuries. The long, slow-moving procession of vehicles, animals, men, and machinery departed at dawn from the imperial capital, and nobody saw it go save a beggar and a prostitute or two and a suicide perched on the cupola of the central tower of the Chamber of Foreign Commerce.

The journey was difficult. They had to cross three provinces, one deep in snow, the next storm-beaten, and the next ever hotter, passing through eight cities, twenty-five towns, and three military posts. They arrived at last, on the thirty-seventh day of winter, at the Valley of Loôc. The location was not only adequate, it was ideal. So much so that the nobleman promised to recommend that the emperor give the geographer, the astronomer, and the architect to the emperor a seat in their respective Academies and a medal with at least three ogives. The Edibu River thundered down out of the Twin Peaks, reaching the valley with only a pleasant murmur, and ran shining through the green plain in a curve that touched the valley’s rim. The sea wind lingered on the slopes and let warm rains fall, and then the sun would rise, to set very late in the far gap between two mountains.

And so, after a moment of astonishment, the nobleman Senoeb’Diaül ordered that the ceremony commence. The priest intoned the prayer, the Office for the Seventh Day of the Ascension of Queiah, in honor of the minister:

“We are those who have remained,” he said, “and those who shall not follow Thee on the ways of the wind that is born in the mouths of Thy sons, for the twelve chains of guilt prevent our movement. When Thy widowed wives have given birth and Thou arrivest at the Precincts, send ozone, O Queiah, to Thine acolytes that they may set us free, O Queiah, to follow Thy footsteps, O Queiah!”

With the final invocation, the engineer gave the nobleman the golden pikestaff, which he stuck into the soft earth. From the top of it flamed the ferocious banner of the Empire. The city had been founded.

During the rest of winter and all spring the stonecutters and masons worked ceaselessly; the architect emended plans, the priest offered prayers, the engineer and the mathematician calculated, the storyteller summed up, the astronomer studied, the sculptor carved, the geographer measured, the painter ground his colors, the general kept watch, and Senoeb’Diaül suffered. Every fortnight a messenger left for the imperial capital with a memorandum for the emperor. At the palace he was given a recompense and a day off, and the memorandum was read by the Second Secretary of the Assistant (Fourth Class) of the Sub-Manager of the Maintenance Section of the Ministry of Southern Provincial Affairs and carefully filed under the letter . The emperor presided at the festival commemorating the Treaty of Hondarrán, planned a punitive expedition to be sent against the Southern nations, invented new titles for his first-born son, hunted with prohibited weapons in the woods of Jiznerr, and had no idea that in the Loôc Valley a city was growing.

The city stretched out to cover the plain on both sides of the Edibu River. It was built of pink marble and yellow wood with blue windows. Six avenues crossed it, three running north-south and three east-west; all the other streets were semicircular, following the curve of the river. In the intersections of the avenues stood statues of white stone, each symbolizing a victory of the Empire, and where the curved streets met the avenues, onyx fountains bearing figures of small girls in bronze and gold shot up sprays of cold water from the deep wells. There was a stadium, seven temples, a library, two theaters, three inns for travelers, a hospital, nine schools, ten restaurants, and a cemetery. Outside the walls on the south side was the red light district, and inside the walls on the north side, the military barracks. Along the riverbanks ran two esplanades joined by a bridge every three blocks. The houses were low, and looking in through the deep doorways one saw at the end of the dark corridor the inner garden and the slender pillars of the balconies. Flowers grew on roofs and vines festooned the walls. The heart of the city was a great open square flanked by the houses and official buildings of the city government, the museum, the archives, and the court house. In the middle towered a bronze effigy of the emperor standing on a slain tiger, his brow lifted to heaven, sword and scepter in his hands. Around it was a garden of exotic plants, with stone benches and sunshades of particolored silk.

On the first day of summer, the nobleman Senoeb’Diaül moved into the mayor’s apartments, and that night for the first time in a long time he slept easy, the first time since that autumn morning when he had bowed before the emperor.

And now certain personages appear who heretofore seemed to have nothing to do with our story: the empress, for example, and one of her sons, and the suicide on the tower of the Chamber of Foreign Commerce, and some others, as we shall see.

The empress had been very pretty, very delicate, and very stupid. The years had given her beauty, strength, and sagacity, three virtues of which the last was the most valuable. She had come to the palace very young, with many other girls of the nobility, and had been chosen by the old empress to be the prince’s wife. She had borne sons and daughters, she had put on the crown in a ceremony that she then had thought moving and that now seemed to her, at most, a bore. She never raised her voice, and had seen to it, first by instinct, then by intention, that the emperor knew nothing about her. The emperor had long ago deserted her, for which she thanked several obscure gods, in order to dedicate himself to annexing territories, hunting, and buying new women. They saw each other only at certain official functions. The empress felt no pity for the emperor’s concubines because she could not and would not feel pity, and because in her youth she had suffered the same torments they did, and if she had had any pleasure, denied it now. But the affair of the thin dark girl, and the founding of a city to celebrate this scandal of screams and frenzy, had turned her indifference to scorn. The girl was dead and forgotten, yes, but the city lived.

The empress had tried once to kill it before it was born, but the attempt miscarried because her chosen instrument, the man to whom the girl’s father had promised her before he sold her at a better price to the envoys of the emperor, turned out to be a weakling, and instead of doing what he was supposed to do, in the darkness, quickly and mercilessly, as he might have done, he climbed up onto the cupola and threw himself off and died shattered at the foot of the tower of the Chamber of Foreign Commerce on the first morning of winter. She had ninety-two icy days, then, to think of another solution. When spring came she sent for her younger son and walked with him in a garden of silver palm trees and metal birds.

The younger son was called Yveldiva’Ad and had only one title, Prince of Innieris. Innieris was a district that had been eliminated seven generations ago and currently was part of Subsandas, a poor maritime province rendered wretched by inordinately long winters, by the ghosts of those who perished at sea, and by desperate invasions of invalids and exiles from the island of Obuer. Nobody held Yveldiva’Ad in much account—fourth in the line of succession to the throne, he was morose, sickly, and unpredictable, and always seemed to know more than anybody ought to know, whether it concerned mathematics, botany, metallurgy, silk painting, prosody, or the propensities and behavior of everybody living in the palace—nobody except his mother the empress. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that Yveldiva’Ad was the fifth emperor of the Kiautonor dynasty, and that he governed fairly well, though his subjects didn’t love him, but we all know that the love of their people matters little to emperors, and even less to the Kiautonors.

Yveldiva’Ad, Prince of Innieris, had one leg shorter than the other and a twisted back, was color-blind, couldn’t stand cold, and couldn’t swallow solid food. He loved music, power, sunlight, cats, the poems of the Saga of Ferel’Da, and gold. And he loved his mother.

So, three days after that meeting in the garden among the silver palm trees, in which many things were decided, including vengeance and the succession to the Golden Throne, there departed from the west gate of the imperial capital an itinerant priest accompanied by five acolytes and sixteen disciples. Although the priest could pass for a holy man, with his crippled body, his lame walk, his lowered eyes, his body muffled in cloaks despite the mildness of the season, the acolytes and disciples all looked strangely alike, tough, hefty, and impassive, walking stiff and soldierly, surrounding the deformed man; but they had gold enough to close the watchful eyes of the guards inspecting their equipment and the trappings of bright metal that could be seen under their clothing. Once away from the capital, before they started around towards the southern sea, they waited for a carriage escorted by fifty more men.

A bulletin from the personal doctor of the Prince of Innieris informed the court that the young lord was keeping to his bed and had been prescribed complete rest, due to liver trouble complicated by a skin condition which, though not serious, might be contagious, so that it was not recommended that visits be paid to his apartments.

In the new city of the Loôc Valley, near the end of spring, the general spoke one night with the nobleman Senoeb’Diaül. That infirm gentleman did not share the soldier’s anxiety. He saw nothing alarming about the rustic settlement discovered by patrols on the other side of the Twin Peaks. The general, however, insisted that nobody had been living there when the region was inspected a few days before their arrival in the valley. Well, said the nobleman, that doesn’t signify; harmless nomads looking for forage, peasants whose farms were drowned out by the spring floods, fugitives looking for a hideout where they’ll be forgotten, it’s unimportant; anyhow, they might be useful if they’re looking for work. Next day the nobleman was further reassured when the general brought him the report of a closer inspection of the settlement: mostly women, few men, no children, two or three old people, a crippled, semi-invalid priest. They said they’d come from a town decimated by bandits and cattle thieves, who’d killed almost all the men and all the children. But the general was a cruel, mistrustful man: that was why he had attained his rank. He didn’t like the women who had welcomed him, too amiable, too well dressed. He distrusted the men, in whom he sniffed the familiar stink of soldier, not peasant sweat. He didn’t believe that mountain bandits, more fighters than murderers, would kill all the children of a town. He wondered how the priest of a village that lived by herding cattle and sowing grain could be so richly fitted out. And finally he had noticed that these people had more houses than they could occupy, and that in the empty houses were traces of life, tools, arms, crumpled cloaks, clothing, even the sheath of a sword under a bench. He made up his mind, behind Senoeb’Diaül’s back, to fall on them, cut the men’s throats, hand the dark-skinned women over to his soldiers, maybe torture the priest, who didn’t look strong and who if he survived might tell him the real explanation for the existence of this settlement, and finally set fire to the buildings of wood and hide.