Kalpa Imperial (18 page)

But the suspiciousness that had made him a general drove him to plan his operation meticulously, and thus too slowly, thinking about the men who would no doubt be hidden on the hill slopes among the trees, and so came the first day of summer, that night when everybody slept in the new houses of stone and marble and yellow wood and blue glass in the city by the river.

Two days later, three inhabitants of the suspect village on the other side of the Twin Peaks, two women and an elderly man, asked to speak to the nobleman Senoeb’Diaül. We’re strong, healthy, hard workers, they said. We don’t have a home any more, this city is new, we could be of use here. The last of the messengers to the capital had already left carrying the final report, with a request for functionaries and citizens for the city, and it had been four days and nights since the nobleman had suffered an attack of his disease. The Edibu River sang beneath the balconies of the mayor’s house, the pink marble grew warm in the sun, the particolored sunshades twinkled in the central square, and the general unfortunately changed his plans.

In the imperial capital, in an office of the Ministry of Southern Provincial Affairs, the new message, the last, was read by an impatient bureaucrat who for two weeks, ever since the death of his superior, had been thinking about nothing but a raise in rank and pay. It was archived under the letter . The emperor was vacationing in his summer villa; his elder son was meeting every other day with ministers, preparing himself for a throne he would never occupy; and the empress was waiting.

Many years afterward, one night, alone, as he had always been since his mother’s death, in a room of the palace that opened on a garden of palm trees, the fifth emperor of the Kiautonor dynasty remembered that there was a dead city in the Loôc Valley. And since it was summer and he heard frogs croaking, he wondered what wild things slithered on the pink marble, and what creatures splashed in the fountains. He imagined the wind slipping along the passageways and the rain falling on the cracked tiles of the roofs, the statues, the tatters of colored silk sunshades. He said to himself that maybe the ghosts of the dead walked the empty streets and entered the houses and sat down at the tables, and this made him remember the banquet celebrated on the night after the nomads had been allowed to move into the city, the banquet over which he had presided as priest. He recalled how the men who had built the city came, drawn by curiosity and by idleness and by the scent of the dark-skinned women; he recalled the sleeping potion in the red wine and the cheerful slaughter executed by the women in the name of their sister who died in the imperial capital, prisoner of the man who was his father, the slaughter which his confidential agents watched to make sure that nobody survived it, the slaughter which was his shortcut to the throne. The first to die were the soldiers, who were on leave that night because the general had postponed his plan, hoping to catch the men he’d never seen and who were there, in the darkness under the walls, outside the gates. Then came the turn of the plumbers, the masons, the glaziers, who died more slowly because they had gathered and prepared the materials from which the city was born. The women shrieked, red with blood up to the elbows, barefoot, intoxicated. The men finished off the job when the wounds were insufficient, and he walked among the bodies looking at open mouths and glazed eyes and the oozing lips of wounds, reciting it all to himself so he wouldn’t forget it when he next met his mother the empress. While the geographer, the architect, the storyteller, the mathematician, the painter, the engineer, were dying, the women sang a love song that told about a maiden who called her lover every night imitating the song of the nocturnal grosbeak and how the lover, hearing it, left the pleasures of the table and gambling and friendship and ran to meet her in a forest hut, while their knives stabbed, cut, sliced, and they gouged out eyes and tore out fingernails. The heart of the nobleman Seneob’Diaül gave out before they got to him, but the women talked it over and decided to cut his body to bits as they would have liked to do with the body of the emperor and throw the pieces over the walls. And yet the wrinkled skin chapped by disease, the withered fingers, the toothless gums not only revolted them but resisted the sharpness of their knives, so they soaked him, dead, in the blood of the other dead, and thus managed to hide his ugliness, and their knifeblades slipped in easily and cut through the thin, hard flesh to the bone. Then they looked for the general. There was a fight, but a short one: the five sentinels who had remained in the barracks died at the hands of the prince’s men, and the women caught the general at the point of driving his sword into his breast and danced with him and forced him to sing the love song with them and stripped him and cut him into pieces as they had done with the nobleman who had been Minister of Aerial Cults, but the heart of the general, who did not suffer from Ohmaz’s Disease, kept beating while the dark-skinned women labored joyfully over his body.

That night, as the silver palm trees rustled in the garden, Yveldiva’Ad, Fifth Emperor of the Dynasty of the Kiautonor, wondered if the unburied dead had been turned into shades so they could gather up their bodies and watch them rot and dry in the summer sun, and if since then they met to shriek and moan in the curved avenues and the squares of Hadremaür, the dead city of Loôc Valley. It was a pointless question, since the emperor did not believe in ghosts.

The emperor lay down in his bed that was too wide, too high and, as he did every night, tossed and turned, sleepless and exasperated, till dawn. When he slept at last, the sunlight of another summer shone yellow on the palm trees of the garden of guilt.

The Pool

To Hugo Padeletti

The storyteller said: People choose strange professions, don’t you agree? I’m not talking about picturesque or unusual jobs, but about people who don’t live in order to be or try to be the best persons possible, but only to add titles to their name, empty, hollow, resounding titles, false, useless trappings that weigh them down and suck them dry and end up by replacing them altogether. This all has to do what I’m about to tell you.

There was a man who lived in a house in a city that was the capital of the Empire, many, many years ago. Not that that matters: it could have happened yesterday, it could happen tomorrow, or some day next year.

But the Empire then wasn’t what it is today. It hadn’t achieved what is now proudly called Progress, though perhaps it was on the way to it. The capital was a mess of a place where, as always, wise emperors succeeded stupid ones and vice versa. In the days I’m telling you about, the ruling emperor was of the dynasty of the Chaixis, Chaloumell the Bald, not altogether a bad man, but one who loved wealth and power too well, so that if he wasn’t quite a disaster for the people, neither was he a blessing.

He wasn’t one of the emperors that everybody loves or everybody hates. Some adulated him, some conspired against him, as usual. Powerful families and those who aspired to power supported and upheld and defended him while they fought among themselves for the best places near the throne. Simple folk got along as best they could. And some people met in secret places to plan the downfall and death of the Lord of the Golden Throne.

On a day in early spring the Emperor Chaloumell was informed by one of his ministers that a faction, who called themselves by the name of a wildflower that his gardeners had never let grow in the palace grounds, were rapidly gaining followers, arming themselves one way and another, and preparing for rebellion. The emperor was alarmed. So, that very night, the Imperial Guard swept through the city and surprised a meeting of the Borkhausis. Almost all the conspirators died cruelly, but among those who escaped was a girl called Veevil.

Well, now, in a tree-lined street, a very quiet, out-of-the-way street far from the city center and the public buildings, there stood a white house with a big front door that always stood ajar. The oldest neighbors said their grandparents had told them it used to be an asylum, a brothel, a school, a rest-house for pilgrims, and that a treasure was buried in the courtyard. It didn’t look to be any of those things. It just looked like a house. It had a lot of rooms with high ceilings and windows with wooden shutters opening onto the courtyard; in the garden behind it were trees, a fountain, and a pool; in the hot weather it stayed cool inside the thick walls and you could hear the sound of water and the voices of the birds in the leaves. It smelled like stored grain, damp earth, and spices. Anyone passing by could come in, out of curiosity or out of need. In fact, many people came through that door. Those who came out of curiosity crossed the courtyard, wet their hands in the water of the fountain, and strolled a bit under the trees; the boldest peeked into the rooms. Then they went off to tell their friends and relatives, for days after, what they’d seen. Those who came out of need crossed the courtyard, went through an arcade almost hidden by vines, and knocked on a half-closed door that was on the right if you were going to the garden behind the house. From inside the room someone would answer, telling them to wait or to come in.

The bald emperor, fifteenth of the Chaixis dynasty, was not a well man. He had sick fits and fainting fits, blood ran from his nose sometimes and his hands trembled. Sometimes his knees grew weak and he had to sit down and breathe through his mouth while the nausea kept growing.

“His Imperial Majesty would be well advised to see a doctor,” said the courtiers.

“Doctors are all asses,” said the emperor.

The empress said nothing because she cared nothing about her husband’s health: she had given him six sons, she had a lover, and she liked emeralds, thick sweet liqueurs, parties, and very young girls.

“I will not permit those dirty ignorant little men to go poking about inside me,” said the emperor.

But he had a fainting fit one day that lasted hours, and when he woke he felt that he couldn’t breathe and death must be near. He gave in. When he had breath enough, he ordered that a doctor be sent for. There was none in the palace, but somebody said, “In Whiterose Street there’s an old doctor. They say he knows a lot and cures the most desperate cases.”

The Duke of Asfiddes, who for years had aspired to a ministry and had never achieved it because he was too rich and his wife was too beautiful, entered the half-open front door. Accustomed to being received everywhere with great ceremony, he was disconcerted by the silence and the lack of syrupy voices and curtseys. After feeling disconcerted he got angry. With great strides he stormed around opening doors and sticking his head into rooms. He saw many things he did not expect to see, and when he came to the vine-covered door farthest down the arcade and opened it, he found himself facing a man who sat cross-legged on the mat on the stone floor.

“Good day,” the man said.

“I am the Duke of Asfiddes, sent in search of a doctor by His Imperial Majesty Chaloumell VII!”

“Good day,” the man said.

“Good day,” said the duke.

When the duke returned to the palace, furious with himself, the doctor, His Imperial Majesty, and everything else, the emperor was having another spell of shortness of breath and was seeing death in every corner.

“Where’s the doctor?” they asked the duke, and he had to confess, “He says he isn’t going to come. He says sick people have to come to his house. He does his curing there.”

The emperor was too busy breathing to hear this, but one of the ministers sent for the captain of the Guard and ordered him to go to the white house in Whiterose Street and fetch the man by force.

The duke summoned the captain before he left and described the doctor to him. The captain listened attentively and went to get his men. But when the duke arrived at the palace gates to wait for the Guards, a tall man with greying hair, wearing a linen tunic, barefoot, was talking with the soldiers on duty.

The duke came up to him. “You came,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You did well to do so. The Guards were going to your house to fetch you away by force.”

“I had to go out to look for ambalias,” the doctor said, “and in the Silversmiths’ Quarter I saw the old women who make the fasteners for necklaces, so I thought that perhaps emperors fall ill of other illnesses than commoners do. So I came.”

The duke sent a soldier to call off the captain. The captain was annoyed: he enjoyed fetching people away by force.

The doctor was brought before the emperor and the courtiers talked hopefully of a cure. But the emperor got no better. Not only that, he got worse, and so went on saying doctors were asses and never again would he let one be brought to the palace even if his fainting fits lasted hours or days and the shortness of breath brought him to the brink of death clothed in the red of the blood that ran from his nose and pounded in the veins of his neck and temple.

If anybody tried to defend physicians, Chaloumell told them that the only one he had allowed into the palace hadn’t examined him carefully nor shown respect for him, for him, the emperor: that he hadn’t palpated nor ausculted, and had said nothing except that he shouldn’t go on sleeping in that room, that he should learn to play the serel, should not travel in the mountains, and should eat only white foods.

“A lot of asses,” said the emperor, breathing heavily and clutching the arms of his chair to keep his hands from trembling, “and he was the most asinine of the lot. Steamed fish, potatoes, tubelid roots, bah!”

When Veevil fled from the house where the Imperial Guardsmen were cutting the conspirators’ throats, her only thought was to get out of the capital that night. She ran and ran, crossing streets and parks, her hand over her mouth so that nobody could hear her sobbing. All at once she stopped, sat down on the doorstep of a house, and thought. Why was she on the run? Nobody knew her name, any more than she knew the names of the other members of the group. So nobody was going to denounce her, even if some had been saved from the slaughter to be tortured. What’s more, others might have got away as she had. What she had to do was stay in the capital, wait a while, try to find others who had escaped, and with them reorganize the rebellion to bring down this emperor who cared nothing for his people. She got up from the doorstep and, walking tranquilly, not sobbing, swinging her arms like any carefree young woman, went home. Her parents and brothers were asleep. She went up the stairs quietly and to her room. She didn’t light the lights, she got undressed, opened the balcony door that looked out to the back, and smiled to see in the big house across the gardens a light still burning: the old doctor was studying. Or sitting by a sick person, or meditating, or whatever. She got into bed and fell asleep.

Some days went by, maybe some weeks. The empress was in a vile humor. So was the captain of the Guards. The emperor didn’t see death waiting but his hands trembled and he felt shooting pains in the nape of his neck. People went into the white house on the tree-lined street and Veevil greeted the old doctor from her balcony when she saw him walk in the garden and sit by the pool, and he smiled at her. Sometimes he raised his hand in a gesture of salute and sat watching her, thinking how beautiful she was.

In the middle of spring a square, solid, serious man came in the front door. Passing through the courtyard where the buried treasure was said to be, near the gurgling fountain, under the trees whose leaves moved with a sound of silky paper and the birds swelled out their chests calling to one another, he made no wrong turns and did not lose his temper as the Duke of Asfiddes had. He waited a moment and looked about, and then clapped his hands and cried, “Hey! Anybody here?”

His voice rang out and was amplified as it struck the white walls and came back to him as if from a secret grotto beyond the inhabited parts of the house. But nobody answered. He returned to the courtyard, and as the duke had done, opened several doors. And going from one door to the next he saw the arcade almost hidden by creepers and went along it and came to the vine-hidden door, approached it, opened it. The man sitting cross-legged on the mat on the stone floor opened his eyes. “Good day,” he said.

“Ah, good day,” said the other. “I’m looking for the doctor.”

“That’s me.”

“May I come in?”

“Yes.”

So he entered the room and glanced round, looking for a chair, a bench, something to sit down on, and for medical instruments and bottles of medicines, and saw nothing. Accordingly he took two steps and sat down on the mat.

“I’m ill,” he said.

“Hmm,” the doctor said, “yes, but it’s not serious.”

The man was silent a moment looking at him.

“How can you possibly know? I haven’t been in this room five seconds.”

“If it was serious, your body would force you to feel some kind of fear. And all fears are exclusive: yours wouldn’t have allowed you to take any interest in what you found in the room.”

“Good,” the man said, “good. You may be right.”

“What is your work?”

“I’m a merchant,” the man said. “I deal in glass. Glass goods.”

“What need is there to lie?”

“Eh?”

“Selling glass doesn’t lead to callused hands, or a straight spine with the shoulders back.”

The man turned his head and let his gaze wander over the walls and the window that gave on the garden. He finally looked again at the doctor. “Actually,” he said, “I was a dealer in glass and crystal a long time ago, and I’d like to do that again, but at present I’m a workman.”

“You are?”

“Yes, I am.”

“And what is it that makes you feel sick?”

“It hurts here.”

“Did you go to school when you were a boy?”

“Yes,” the man said.

“What did you like best to study?”

“Nothing. I hated studying.”

“Ah,” said the doctor.

“Sometimes I feel a burning cold that rises from my stomach into my throat.”

“Ah,” the doctor said again. “And if now you had the time and money for studying, which would you prefer, mathematics or music?”

The man thought it over. “Mathematics,” he said, opening his eyes wide.

“Why?”

“It’s more useful. I don’t say I don’t enjoy music, but if you want music you hire a musician.”

“Possibly,” said the doctor. “Have you ever had the impression of having known for a long time a person you’ve just met?”

“I don’t know,” the man said. “Maybe so, I don’t remember, one of those notions you have when you’re very young.”

“Is there a very deep wardrobe in your bedroom?”

“No. There’s a wardrobe, but it’s not very deep.”

Then the doctor leaned over and touched the side of the neck of the man who called himself a workman, laying one finger under the earlobe. “Does that hurt?”

“No.”

The doctor withdrew his hand, sat up very straight again, and said, “No, it’s not serious. You’ll be well soon.”