Kalpa Imperial (21 page)

The second time he insisted that the women not be present.

“They take half your pleasure from you,” he said to Master Bramaltariq. “They breathe it in from you, drink it, devour it. You’ll watch better alone.”

The fat man assented, quickly, anxiously. He had the wives shut up in the next room, and they snivelled and scrabbled at the door in vain all evening. Drondlann clapped his hands and gave the command. The boy danced.

Dance: a word easily spoken. At that time an unknown word, which the dealer in curiosities thought Grugroul had invented, for the art of dancing had been lost; a word which to him, since he had heard it and learned to say it in secret, seemed to slide off his lips almost without the need to use his mouth. That is what the boy did: dance, dance. And Drondlann did not watch him, and outside it was already night. On the other hand Master Bramaltariq, who despite his wives, cloaks, wealth, and horses was a fool, followed with staring, reddened eyes every movement of that body passing and repassing through the air of the room. The veins of his neck and temples stood out like stretched cords; he breathed with increasing difficulty and made senseless gestures as if trying to restrain the dancer, or help him, or kill him. But the master of the dance was the other man, the merchant, who was not a fool. The fat master of the stone house fell back in his chair. Drondlann clapped his hands. The boy stood still. The owner of the lands, waters, farms, and souls of Bramaltariquenländ had his eyes open and was still trying to wave his hands: the fingers stretched and contracted, buried in the fur of the blue bearskin cloak. Drondlann smiled at him, spoke to him the way merchants and priests speak, promising marvels, and helped him to sit up.

“Tomorrow,” the fat old man managed to say.

The other frowned and proposed a day of rest.

“Tomorrow,” the old man insisted. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow.”

The dealer said certainly, of course, tomorrow. And the next day he went again with the boy and met Master Bramaltariq full of impatience. Drondlann thought it a pity that the fat man was too foolish even to realize he was near death, for he would have enjoyed seeing terror in those piggy eyes buried in the fat face. Nobody else was in the room and no women whimpered behind the closed doors. It was possible that death would not yet enter through one of those doors: that depended on his skill.

It was stormy, and the boy smiled; he liked rain and lightning. There was a thunderclap, and without waiting for the handclap the boy began to dance. The dealer had to make a great effort to keep from watching him: he heard the galloping of the golden steeds, he longed for the deserts and the fiery liquors and the petrified seas and his childhood. But he got hold of himself and made himself think about his shop in Eagle Alley, the cages, the sharp stink, the visits by buyers and sellers, the shadows, the dim windows that looked on the street. He hated it, but he was going to miss it.

And at another thunderclap Master Bramaltariq got up from his chair. The dealer watched him stand there, trembling, bloated, unsteady; he saw him reach out his arm as if he wanted to touch the dancer. Then that short, fat arm in its bejeweled, gold-fringed silk sleeve began to move, up, down, right, left, and the other arm was moving too, and the round head was swaying. He made two steps heavy enough to collapse the floor of the room and lifted one leg. Drondlann realized that the fat man was trying to dance, and broke out laughing. The shopkeeper of Eagle Alley roared with laughter at Master Bramaltariq, and the thunder boomed outdoors, and indoors the boy moved swiftly through the room taking various poses, and the dying old man sweated in his heavy clothing trying to imitate that white shape that intoxicated his blood and senses. But no one heard, no one knew anything. Drondlann clapped his hands and stopped the dance and left. Master Bramaltariq did not notice: he was in the middle of the room turning slowly about with one hand on his breast and the other held up towards the stormclouds.

Drondlann let several days pass, waiting till the master summoned him. Again it was evening, but the sky was clear. He wondered if there were black, quiet fish in that lake. The boy danced.

The shopkeeper of Eagle Alley had seen madness and death. Years ago, many years ago, astride a horse, hearing laughing trumpets blow the call to arms and the charge, he had seen men around him go mad and die. He himself had gone into madness and death and had returned to life: he had brandished a sword, raised a shield, borne a severed head aloft on a lance. And what was his life, now, in the shop in the alley?

He stopped the dance one moment before Master Bramaltariq plunged into delirium. He went to him and talked to him slowly, softly, gently. He told him that this dance had been the last. Yes, the last unless . . . But the precautions, the circumlocutions, were useless. The old gentleman did not hear him. So Drondlann took from his pocket the document and the stiletto, pricked the old man’s right index finger, and had him sign the bottom of the page in blood. That was all, and the sky was still bright when the servants carried him down the staircase.

That night he hid the document under a loose board in the floor of the shop, and could not sleep.

Next day he took it from its hiding place and went with the boy to the house on the lake. Master Bramaltariq was no longer speaking, he who had given commands, issued judgments, ordered punishments. He was so mute that Drondlann thought he could take him back to the shop in Eagle Alley and sell him cheap. He clapped his hands.

He had no more than looked at the old man when he had the pleasure of seeing him die. He did not die like a warrior. He was no longer powerful, no longer imposing, not even fat. His reddish face had turned grey and the knotted veins were dark and swollen. He was not sweating: he was dried up, withered, feeble. But he wanted to go on watching the boy’s mobile body, go on watching till death. And he died mad, gasping like one of the black lake fish, sprawled across what had been his treasures and luxuries.

Drondlann clapped his hands and the boy stopped dancing. He called the servants and the wives, he joined them in the funeral laments, howled, struck his clenched fists on his breast, bowed down to earth keening.

And after what he thought a decent interval, after the fat man was buried and the stupefaction of death had passed, when everybody was asking what would become of those vast properties and immense riches, the dealer in curiosities called for a lawyer and showed him the document.

It was beautiful, that house of stone and wood in the middle of the lake, so beautiful that he never once went back to the shop in Eagle Alley. When the stink there became insupportable the neighbors dragged off the corpses of the curiosities, shared out the cages and furniture, sealed up the doors and windows. The ex-dealer remained quite untroubled and went on living peacefully, never clapping his hands. The blond boy got fat: he ate too much and lazed through the days, looked after by the wives and servants. Sometimes thunder made him start. Drondlann had twenty-three stallions, eleven wives, three short cloaks of green, purple, and blue bearskin; he was no longer Drondlann but Master Bramaltariq, and sometimes he dreamed of a white form that moved dancing through the rooms of the house on the lake, in the years of the reign of Emperor Horhórides III, of the dynasty of the Jénningses.

“Down There in the South”

Vast is the Empire, said the storyteller, so vast that a man can’t cross it in his lifetime. You might be born in Lyumba-Lavior and start traveling and never stop and when death came, however long in coming, you might not even have reached Gim-Ghimlassa. Life can be lived anywhere, an ancient poet is said to have said, and if you meditate on that you’ll see it’s a noble thought. You can live in the great, handsome cities of the North, the white capitals with sonorous names or the grey fortress-cities or the beach-side resort towns full of music. You can live in tents in the desert following the oases that shift with the seasons. You can live on the rivers in houseboats, fishing, doing laundry, scrubbing the deck, watching people and houses and fields go by, making love in a hammock and bargaining with different people every day. You can live in a log cabin near the mountain peaks, in a marble palace, in a fetid slum, a convent, a school, a tower, a brothel. And also you can live in the South.

Yes, yes, my good people, I do believe it: you can live in the South. And die there. And can get born, grow, learn, kill, suffer in the South. Do you know the South? Have you been to that forbidden, tempting land? Have you gone to that paradise of monsters, cave of the assassins, realm of barbarity? Do you know the people of the South? Have you bedded their women, got drunk with their men, listened to their old people? It’s cold here now in the North; for months now the cold hasn’t let up, and this morning we got up in the dark and blew on our fingers and froze our feet on the floor and lighted the hearthfire and the stoves. Poor folk knocked the ashes off yesterday’s embers and rich folk ordered servants to stoke the furnace fires in the basements of their great houses. We’ve drunk hot chocolate and wrapped up warm and at midmorning we’ve gone into a bar for a hot punch. Some vagabonds have died in the snowy fields and no bird sings and the ice thaws on windows and drips from the stone rosettes of balconies, and tonight there will be stars in a clear sky, and tomorrow we’ll be colder than we were today.

And it’s warm, now, down South. The days are long and pitiless. A white sun breeds clouds of mist on the lagoons in the marshland. People walk barefoot on the ground and the grass, half naked; they wake early, very early; they sleep through the midday and get up again when the sun sinks purple behind the tops of the huge trees. That’s how it is down there in the South, green, suffocating, humid, full of violence and somnolence. Men and women don’t gather around a fire but under palm trees that shoot up tall to escape the ferns that fasten on their trunks. And they don’t listen to storytellers tell the deeds of the Empire, because the South refuses to admit that it’s part of the Empire. They listen, sure enough, but they listen to something different: something that I’ve thought might be a treasure as great as the history of the greatest, most powerful empire known to man, or might be that same story told differently: they listen to the voices of the damp, warm earth, the sounds of the wind, the song of rivers, and what the leaves, the air, the animals are saying.

Yes, and it’s always been that way, always. There’ve been emperors who dreamed of subjugating the South. There’ve been emperors who tried it, and some thought they’d done it. But with what? I ask, with what? With power, weapons, armies, fire, terror? Useless, all that, completely useless: all power can do is silence people, keep them from singing, arguing, dancing, talking, brawling, making speeches and composing music. That’s all. That’s a lot, you may say, but I tell you it’s not enough. For what power can keep the earth from speaking to people? What weapons can keep water from running and stones from rolling? What artillery can keep a storm from crouching on the horizon, ready to burst? That’s something no emperor has managed yet. On the contrary, not seldom, when they wanted silence, quiet, submission from the South, what they got was the tumult of war and rebellion.

It was thus, trying to subdue the South, that the Emperor Sebbredel IV died, eleventh ruler of the House of the Bbredasoës, mediocre rulers all of them, all forgotten but two: the founder of the dynasty, Babbabed the Silent, and the last, Sebbredel IV, famed and remembered not for his own merits but for those of a fugitive, an adventurer, on whom fate played a dirty trick.

Who was Liel-Andranassder, are we going to find out? Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say, and even if you’re right, and I tell you that you’re right, yet I also tell you that you’re wrong. A life, like a story, has many parts, and each part is made of other ever smaller parts; for, however small and banal it may be, part of a story is a story, and part of a life is a life. You’re going to tell me about the man who changed an Empire and altered the course of history, and that’s the truth. And I’m going to tell you, and it’s the truth too, about a young man, son of a bankrupt noble family, who’d lived surrounded by luxury and every amenity, and couldn’t resign himself to poverty when it came. His parents took him with them to the modest country house which was all they had left, but at twenty Liel-Andranassder left that life, which he considered contemptible and despicable, and came to the capital. I won’t tell you all he did for eight long years, but I can tell you that he went through real humiliation and shame, that he endured the unendurable, lost what innocence he’d had, got fat, turned lazy, lascivious, and fawning. But he also got what he wanted: a lot of money. Easy money, that ran quickly through his pale hands in a senseless, hopeless chase after respectability and honor, though he didn’t then know the meaning of those words. And when he got to the end of the money he’d go back to the gaming houses, to usury, to sycophancy, and for a while he’d have plenty again. Until one night he killed a man who accused him of rigging the game.

His clothes smeared with blood, trembling, stammering, all he could do was vomit near the corpse: till then he’d only seen respectable corpses, with powerful relatives, for whom he had to weep and mourn convincingly. But to his own surprise he recovered quickly, put horror aside, washed his face and hands, and scattered a bit of gold here and there among the croupiers and managers and waiters. He persuaded himself that the people of the casino would dispose of the body in gratitude for his gifts and to avoid a scandal; and he went home. He told himself he was safe.

He didn’t sleep much that night. To tell the truth, he didn’t sleep at all. He tried to think, is what he did. But he was so full of alcohol and confusion that all he could bring to mind was the dead man’s face, the insult, the wounds, the horrified eyes of the owner of the casino. And he told himself that it was unimportant; he was a gentleman, obliged to kill to defend his honor, everybody knew him and would protect him, nothing would happen, the other man was a rustic, a nobody, with no connections, no influence.

Now here is a little detail that doesn’t show up in the great chronicles and history books but only in a letter or a little-known account here and there, and that we’d even prefer to forget: Liel-Andranassder had, in fact, rigged the game. How could he not, when it was his principal source of income? Everybody knew he cheated, so that recently he’d only been able to play against out-of-towners, people who didn’t know him. And he knew perfectly well, how could he not know it, that he’d cheated the dead man. But so what? He was a notable person, member of an ancient, distinguished noble family; his grandfathers had been generals of the Empire; his grandmothers had been presented at court; he himself had once been invited to a palace reception and had seen, from a distance, the Emperor Sebbredel IV.

Another detail, and this one does show up in the history books and folios of chronicles, the sagas and the popular songs: the dead man was not a nobody.

It was near dawn when Liel-Andranassder heard steps in his anteroom. He jumped out of bed and got dressed in a hurry. He decided he ought to leave the city for a few days, go visit his parents in the country till the police stopped asking questions or the dead man’s relations stopped looking for him. That’s what he’d do, sure enough, he’d tell the servants to get the carriage ready right away.

What happened next has been very badly misinterpreted. The legend has it that his loyal and devoted servants warned him of the danger he was in so that he could escape. My dear friends, when you hear people say that, hasten to deny it, to say that’s not quite how it was, and if they don’t believe you, tell them it was I who told you so. Liel-Andranassder did escape, that’s true, and did so thanks to one of his servants, that’s true: but it wasn’t loyalty or affection, but rancor, that moved the man to go that morning to his master’s bedroom and say, “Police. Looks like they’re coming here.”

“The police?” he said, trying to make it look as if he wasn’t interested, and failing totally.

“Yes. Yes sir, that’s it. The police. About a hundred of them. Sent by the Duke of Sandemoross.”

“What?” he squealed.

“Yes,” said the servant, happy to see this master who paid him poorly and treated him worse tied up in knots with fear, “and the Chief of the Imperial Police in person is in charge of them. It seems that last night somebody with a dagger killed the emperor’s stepbrother, the Governor of Abbel-Kammir, who was in the capital incognito.”

And so Liel-Andranassder made his getaway. He sent the servant off, locked his door, thought of suicide a moment and ruled it out, not because he was a coward, you have to admit he wasn’t that, but because he had a wild hope of escape, and jumped out the window. And from here on the legends tell the truth: he had incredible good luck. It was just dawn. The Duke of Sandemoross, nephew of the empress, was entering the street door as the master of the house ran out the tradesmen’s gate behind the house.

Five minutes later the duke, roaring with fury, ordered that the house be sacked and burned.

Five minutes later Liel-Andranassder was walking slowly through the market place like an idle gentleman who’d got up unusually early and come out to see at what was for sale in the stalls. He stopped here and there, asked the price of a buckle, praised a length of velvet, examined some engravings, tested the edge of a dagger, and went on his way. He couldn’t have bought anything since he hadn’t a penny on him, but he needed to think, he wanted to gain time, to try to work out a plan, and above all he wanted to hear what was being said. He knew the market is the city’s soundbox. So he learned that they were looking for him, and thought again of suicide and again refused the thought. He went back across the market place and came to the river, and there a prostitute saved him.

When the duke’s men got to the riverbank, not because they knew he was there but because they were looking everywhere, he was sleeping in a rather dirty bed aboard one of those barges where you can gamble and buy women, and the prostitute was combing her hair in front of the mirror and looking at the gold ring glittering on the middle finger of her left hand, more than satisfied by this unexpected client who hadn’t even wanted much from her. The barge was sailing upstream towards Durbbafal because its master didn’t like policemen and, finding that a search was going on throughout the city, came back to his boat almost on Liel-Andranassder’s heels without stopping to find out who or what the police were looking for. That day the search for the assassin was limited to the capital and its environs, and only late that night did the duke admit that the criminal might have left the city, and began to think of extending the hunt. And so when the Imperial Police reached Durbbafal, the assassin was no longer there.

He was on his way south. He hadn’t chosen to hide in the South; as a Northerner he feared and despised those unknown provinces. But at the moment he had no choice. He had hopes, oh, yes, he still had real hopes of escaping. In an inn he had traded his elegant clothes for something to eat and a cotton tunic, and put on sandals instead of heeled shoes. He wasn’t walking alone, but he meant to abandon his companions whenever and wherever he could safely do so. And furthermore, for the moment at least, he was safe, because he wore pinned on his chest the badge of the Imperial Police, and walked among men who also wore the badge of the Imperial Police, under the command of a sergeant, a veteran of the Selbic Wars, who’d served twelve years in the troop of the Duke of Sandemoross.

This too is on record in the chronicles: how Liel-Andranassder, the ruined nobleman, gambler and cheat, hunted as an assassin, got drunk in the inn with a couple of vagabonds, and how the police came on them along the road from Durbbafal to Laprac-Lennut and took them to the nearest police post. Hearing talk there of the assassination of the emperor’s stepbrother, and desperate to evade suspicion, he’d started talking too, telling with drunken enjoyment what he’d do to that assassin if he met him.

“That fat fellow might be useful,” said the sergeant, who was an imbecile, and whose orders were to recruit as many men as he could to hunt the criminal throughout the Empire.

They stuck the drunk’s head in a basin of cold water, let him sleep on a bench, and when he woke up gave him coffee and asked his name.

“Andronessio,” he said.

“Your papers.”

“I haven’t got any,” he stammered.

“You let them get stolen, stupid,” said the sergeant. “Make him out some temporary papers. You’re in the police now, got it?”

“Yessir.”

“And if you disobey an order or make a mistake, just once, I’ll have you stuck in jail for the rest of your life, which will be extremely short, got it?”

“Yessir.”

“I wonder if he’ll be any use,” the sergeant sighed, and paid him no more attention.

So all of a sudden he was a policeman, had papers of identity, and was going away from the capital. Those were days of weariness, hunger, hardship; his feet were cut and bruised, he lost weight, his skin was chafed by the roughness of common clothing, his fingernails got dirty, his hair long and wild. He missed his house, his money, his servants, his carriage, his soft bed, his polished floors, and gambling, and the vile society he knew so well. But they hadn’t caught him. Not yet.