Kalpa Imperial (22 page)

And so he marched for three months, sleeping in the rain, living on bits and scraps, helping arrest and punish poor devils, vagabonds, whores, thieves. Until in a town near the border of Brusta-Dzan province he realized that he had become somebody else.

“How come they call you Fatty?” the innkeeper asked.

“Me?”

“Hey, Andronessio, it’s on account of you used to be fat,” one of the policemen said.

The others laughed.

“Yes,” said Andronessio, “guess I was. A long time ago.”

And he got up to look at himself in a dim mirror near the stairs. The man looking back from the spotted quicksilver was not Liel-Andranassder. Nor was he Fatty. Nor was he Andronessio the policeman. Who would he be now? Who could he be?

“I’m me,” he said to himself, but he still didn’t know who he was.

Twelve leagues farther on, learning they’d been ordered to take another road that led northward and would bring them back to the capital, he ran off one night, barefoot, without the badge of the Imperial Police, leaving his mates asleep and the improvised camp without a guard. This time it was his own decision to go south. He was resolved to keep clear away from the emperor, the duke, the capital, the Imperial Police, and danger, and he didn’t have anywhere else to go. Death was waiting for him in the North as a murderer and now as a deserter. He knew it was waiting for him in the South too, but maybe there it wouldn’t take so long to come.

There is a border between the North and the South, we all know that. But if in a lot of places the border is definite, visible, firmly under the control of the bureaucracy, in a lot of other place it isn’t. It’s as if it wasn’t there. So one day he crossed the border without knowing it. All he knew was that the weather kept getting hotter, that he was hungry and thirsty all the time, that his wounds and cuts had scarred over, and that he had very few memories left of houses with servants and soft beds, of men with knives at the exit of a gambling-den, of police and manhunts.

One night he fell asleep more heavily than usual and when the sun rose he struggled to wake but could not. He went on sleeping and dreamed. I can’t tell you what he dreamed, but I imagine there were faces, many faces, and running blood. I imagine also that he was afraid, that he sweat cold and tossed and moaned, even cried out aloud, but could not wake.

Many days later he opened his eyes and saw a straw roof. He fell asleep again and opened his eye again and saw a window. After sleeping dreamlessly some hours more he woke. It was night. Someone asked him his name.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He was given water. Where did he come from? somebody asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, and slept, and did not dream.

Next morning he heard noises and voices before he opened his eyes; he stayed still, feeling his body heavy and aching. He was hungry.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

“Good,” somebody said.

A woman gave him food. During that day two or three men came and stood around looking at him and one of them talked to the woman. But it was a long time before he could get up and walk.

The woman’s name was Rammsa. She had five children. Her eldest son was one of the men who had showed up the first day to look at him. “You drank poisonous water from the Tigers’ Well,” he said.

“Ah. I didn’t know it was poisonous.”

“How could anyone not know that?” asked Orgammbm, son of Rammsa. “How could anyone not know so many things? Your name, for instance. Have you forgotten it?”

“No, it’s not that,” he said, “not that. I know I had many names.”

“Many names,” said Orgammbm, and stopped, and stared at him.

“Yes.”

He ate and drank in the mud hut where Rammsa lived with her three youngest children. During the day he sat under the trees or watched the river run, and one day he asked Genna, Orgammbm’s youngest sister, to teach him to braid leather, because he wanted to make himself sandals.

“Women don’t braid leather,” Genna said, looking at him wonderingly, “that’s men’s work.”

He laughed because Genna wasn’t a woman but a child who scarcely reached his shoulder, and she said she’d call one of her brothers to teach him.

“And what do women do, Genna?” he asked, before she’d gone far.

She turned around and stood looking at him in silence, as if asking herself whether or not to answer him. Finally she decided it was worth the trouble, and she began to sing softly:

The world is nothing and nothing

You have to sit and think

Shut your eyes and think

Hold out your hand and think

Breathe deep and think

Move your feet and think

And then the world is nothing and is

The kitchen of your house

“And what does that mean?” he asked.

“What it means,” said Genna, and went to find her brother.

He learned to braid leather and made himself two pair of sandals and a belt, which he showed to Orgammbm. Rammsa’s eldest son told him that they were well made, almost as if by a craftsman; and showed them to his mother, saying, “He says he remembers having many names but doesn’t know his name.”

Rammsa looked at the two young men sitting on her house-mat, her son who was like all men, a bit stupid, very vulnerable, and very valiant, and the other, the stranger, who was not like all men. She had said, “Give him to me, he’ll live,” when the men had brought him in dying, struggling, convulsing, lips swollen, gasping for breath, nose and mouth full of dried blood. And she, who had washed him and cared for him, had forced him to swallow green mandremillia seeds and made him lie face down so that he wouldn’t choke and had cleaned up the vomit and the blood, she was ready to smile, to give hopeful approval, to speak. But because she had suffered, had had a hard life and learned prudence, she said only, “Good,” and looked out the window at the river. “Good,” she said again, “it might or might not mean anything. We don’t even know where he comes from. And he doesn’t know, either, does he?”

He did remember where he came from, of course he did, though sometimes it seemed to him that these memories were dreams born of the poison, or belonged to somebody else; but as he was becoming prudent, like Rammsa, he said, “That’s it. I don’t know. I don’t know where I come from or who I am.”

“No,” said Rammsa, “that’s foolishness. Everybody is who he is.”

“But the world is nothing and nothing,” he said, not knowing why he said it, only because he thought that what the mother had said was a good way to end the daughter’s song.

Rammsa started, she who was always so calm. “Who told you that?”

“Genna, Rammsa’s daughter.”

Nobody said anything more. Orgammbm lowered his eyes and looked again at the sandals and belt, and Rammsa did nothing: she just sat there, serene, with them. And in the quiet and silence he thought how almost always Rammsa seemed to be doing nothing, but that might not be so, for an idle or useless woman couldn’t be as important as he felt her to be.

A few days later they told him to go. They didn’t kick him out, but told him he had to go. At that moment, with his burden of memories, his own or somebody else’s, it occurred to him that the Imperial Police were coming and the inhabitants of the city, town, whatever this was he was living in, were trying to save him. If he’d gone on being the man who fled the capital after stabbing the emperor’s stepbrother to death, he surely would have thought differently: that they hated him, were driving him away, resented him because in the convalescent wanderer they’d guessed the Northerner used to luxuries and conveniences they’d never known. But even if he no longer was that man, he kept some trace of him, and so he did think about danger. Perhaps Rammsa saw it in his eyes, for she smiled and said, “Nothing bad is going to happen to you, son, unless you want it to. But you’re going to have to go.”

His alarm passed. But not because Rammsa said that, not because he realized that his pursuers were far away, but because his talk with the woman had convinced him that the things he’d considered important weren’t so important, and that the empty place he’d always filled up with all the stuff he had valued so much was indeed empty, empty and open, waiting for what was to come to fill its positions, its ranks, waiting for clear light to fall on clear shapes, and clear spaces to waken clear echoes.

“Why?” he asked the woman.

“Because that is how it is,” she said, “and we have to do a thing so that it can be as it is. Because we were made to know, not to submit.”

And she spoke with such haughty certainty and finality that he could ask no more.

He said nothing and set to shaping a walking stick, but Rammsa’s response had made him think of the song sung him by Genna, the child not as tall as his shoulder, and so he worked away without paying much heed to what he was doing, hoping to see or hear the little girl. Orgammbm came by instead, with one of his younger brothers.

“You’re going to need a knife,” he said, offering him one with a broad, strong blade and an antler haft.

Perhaps he felt once more how the flesh of the man had given to the knife, there in the cobbled street near the door of the gaming house. Or perhaps not, perhaps he felt nothing of the sort and what happened was because the voices of the earth and water are so strong in the South that even a man coming from luxury and corruption can hear them. I don’t know, and there’s nobody who can find out for me; it’s not in words, written or sung, and nobody can tell us. I only know that he answered, “No. I don’t want a knife. I don’t want weapons.”

“You don’t?” Orgammbm’s younger brother asked. “You really don’t? A spear, bow and arrows? Nothing?”

“No. Nothing.”

“How are you going to hunt, then?”

“I’m not going to hunt.”

And yet he had hunted when he lived in the cities of the North, all rigged out with fine leather boots and costly, well-oiled weapons, in a cavalcade under the crowns of the autumn trees on the country estate of some nobleman who hadn’t been able to get out of inviting him. But now, no, now he didn’t want to hunt: let tigers poison the wells, let his guts knot up with hunger, but he wasn’t going to hunt.

“Very well,” said Orgammbm, “very well, but you’ll want something to fish with.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “A net, maybe.”

And next morning he left. But before he left, in the night, two things happened to him: he saw the townsmen dance, only the men, naked, shining, grave, all the men of the village, between the houses and the riverbank; and he spoke with Genna.

“What are they doing?” he asked the girl.

“Dancing, don’t you see?”

“Yes, but why?”

“What a question,” she said condescendingly.

“I mean is it a religious occasion, or are they celebrating something?”

“I don’t understand,” she said, and went on watching the men dance.

“It’s I who don’t understand,” he said.

“That’s true,” said the girl.

They stayed side by side, watching. He saw the bare feet fall and rise, the heels strike and slide, the toes grip the hard earth, the bodies arch, the heads turn, the half-closed eyes, the open mouths.

“What are they dancing?” he asked.

“Ah!” said she. “Finally you understand. It’s the Twenty-Fourth Dance. It’s called Seven Shells.”

And next morning he left, as he had said he would. He took his two pair of sandals, his belt, a bag of provisions, and a net. It was hot. The sky was cloudy but the sun’s so strong there in the South that it heated up everything from above the heavy clouds. And there’s so much water there, the rivers run and leap and overflow their channels, marshes spread out and lakes fill the low places, so that the world is green and golden and everything grows and sings. He had to keep off the insects that flew and crawled and dropped from branches, but his sandals protected the soles of his feet, and in the morning he’d pick damp tiaulana leaves, squeeze them with his fingers, and cover his body, face, arms and shoulders with the whitish juice. He lived on fruit and spinner-bird eggs and sometimes eggs of the little zedanna bird who leaves them to keep warm in the sun and goes off pecking up bugs by the water and only returns to them at evening; and he drank nothing but running water which was not stagnant, or dirty, or thick. He slept in the fork of a big tree when he found one, and if he didn’t find one he didn’t sleep but walked on, always farther south.

He was going upstream along a large river, trying to keep close to its course, walking towards its springs. In places the river formed meanders and swamps, where the water seemed not to come from sources far to the south, but to well up endlessly out of the ground. He rested when the morning was getting on and the heat grew almost unbearable: he cleared the ground about the trunk of some high-topped tree not overgrown with ferns and creepers, and sat down there, not leaning back, his arms loose on his lifted knees, his stick within reach of his hand, and dozed. But his eyes were not always shut: he gazed now and then at the water or the green shadow, or watched small shy animals peep from the mouths of their burrows.

He soon noticed that in the South the air was not that inert space he had known in parks, the suffocating perfumed mantle of bedrooms, the weary, stale atmosphere of casinos. The air he breathed here was as thick and fertile as the earth and water. The earth sustained everything and under it was the water; but the water rose up too and covered the earth, and the air that was above them both extended down into the earth enriched by the water, silent or noisy, and a white-gold dust floated and drifted around still things and among the insects with transparent wings and the greedy birds darting among fleshy leaves. And this joyous commotion went on all the time, everywhere, and he had to take part in it.