Kalpa Imperial (24 page)

He asked how it was that there were no guards nor prison cells nor police.

“How can you not know that?” they asked him, and he remembered Ramma’s children.

They told him that there were prisons, and that some people were foolish enough to escape or resist, but that everybody knew what was in store for people who didn’t submit to village law.

“The judge may be a bad person,” they said to him, “and the sentence may be wrong, but justice is justice.”

Then he spoke of the hanged man, and they said that there are crimes that are punished by death and that death can be the best thing that can happen to a woman or a man.

“If they’re driven out,” they said, “if they can’t find shelter or protection anywhere. Do you think anybody could survive, alone, in the wilderness?”

“I do,” he said. “I’ve been surviving.”

“That’s different,” they answered.

“And I buried the hanged man.”

“Good,” they said. “Why not?”

“Compassion isn’t a crime,” the judge said.

“Anybody who comes by can bury a criminal’s body,” said a man, “if he’s listened to the women and knows how long a moment is.”

“Of course,” he said, and told them his name and where he was going.

But he did not go to their town. He accepted some provisions and took his leave of them.

“You must keep watch for your brother,” the very old woman told him.

“Farewell,” he said.

Next day it was very hot, so that he didn’t go as far as on the previous days, and saw water evaporating from the broad leaves and the river-mist rising till it was almost opaque by noon. He wondered how it was that the whole forest wasn’t baked crisp under the white sun, and rested for hours sitting under a giant tree with dense foliage.

But in the North it was very cold, a malign and cutting cold that froze nostrils and fingertips, breath and heart. The Emperor Sebbredel IV, eleventh of the dynasty of the Bbredasoës, listened to his ministers and got more and more uneasy. Why did these things have to happen to him? What kind of useless people did he have serving him? Why didn’t these imbeciles do their duty? Weren’t they paid well so that the emperor could sleep sound and wake cheerful, looking forward to festivals, tourneys, willing and pretty women, a boring meeting or two with functionaries, of course, but all the luxury and satisfactions proper to the life of the most powerful man in the world? And now this? Now, as in his grandfather’s grandfather’s time, he had to think about a punitive expedition against the Southern Provinces? Oh, no, he wasn’t going to subject himself to the discomforts of military life, he wasn’t going to put his royal person in danger far from the palace, the capital, the court, floundering in swamps, driven mad by insects, to kill some evil-smelling rebellious little men whose wives weren’t even acceptable as loot since they smelled just as bad, and besides he’d heard they were all witches. In a word, Sebbredel IV was scared.

It’s fortunate that we citizens of the Empire can, at such times, remember brave and generous emperors such as Atelmaneth III, the Red, or Yhsberaduün the Eaglet, or Rivvner I, who founded the Vnerádir dynasty; or brave and pitiless emperors like Ssulmenit VI, or Biriandirn II, or Dalmauster the Stormy; or brave, mad emperors like the Ferret; or empresses who left the silks and jewels and gratifications of their rank and boldly led armies, like Ysadellma, or Esseriantha the Beautiful, or Mitrria, or Dejsjarbaïl. It’s fortunate, I say, because the mere existence of such men as Sebbredel IV is a disgrace to the Empire, and the history of their governments plagued by vacillation, weakness, and petty egoism is enough to disillusion people; and a disillusioned people is the hardest to govern.

“Who is this man? What’s his name? Where did he come from?” the emperor demanded.

“We don’t know, my Lord,” said the minister of the interior.

“What do you mean, Lord Minister, we don’t know? Have we run out of spies? Don’t we spend good money from the treasury so that informers and provocateurs do their work and don’t come to us with vague guesses? Don’t we train clever youngsters to mix with those damned rebels and send us detailed reports so we can crush them before they threaten our power?”

“Yes, my Lord,” said the minister of finance.

“Yes, my Lord,” said the minister of war, “but . . .”

“But what?” demanded the emperor.

The minister of war took out a paper with a long list of names. “My Lord, our agents in the South have gone silent. Some are dead,” he said hurriedly, “and we know perfectly how and when they died. Rebald’Dizzdan, known in the South as Ganngraamm, for instance, drowned a little over five months ago in Lake Fviagga, near Drambulnyarad. Addroë, known as The Black, fell from a cliff in the Hotspring Mountains. Rubvian’Daur died in a knife fight about four and a half months ago in the Five Goats Range. Drrambinia’Sdar, one of our most effective spies, was found strangled to death in—”

“Enough!” said the emperor. “I am not interested.”

There was a silence in the great throne room. The ministers waited for the emperor to speak, and the emperor tapped his right-hand fingers on the arm of the throne.

“They’re all dead?” he asked.

“No, my Lord,” said the minister of the interior, “but a good many. Those who remain have informed us that this situation may be regarded as an emergency.”

“Who is this man?” the emperor asked again.

“No one knows, Sire,” the ministers said again.

“What does he want? What is he up to? Is he inciting rebellion? Has he declared war on the North? Does he aspire to the throne? Or can he be bought off?”

“It appears that for now he simply travels around the country, and that alone causes a certain dangerous unrest.”

“But why? What do the stupid reports say?”

“The reports, my Lord,” said the minister of war, “say that a man is preparing to raise the South against the Imperial throne. The people of the rebel provinces call him The Man, or The One Coming. Some say he was born in the South and grew up and lives alone deep in the wilderness, which is clearly impossible. Others say he came from the North originally, and some of them even think he was an important man, a nobleman connected to the court. And they say he has had many names, doubtless to elude pursuit.”

“There is no physical description, my Lord,” the minister of the interior put in, “that we can use to identify him. Some say he’s young, others that he’s old. It appears that he’s dark, but in the South of course most people are unpleasantly dark-skinned. And that he has light eyes like a Northerner, which seems improbable, though it does undeniably occur. And that he’s extremely tall and thin, and if Your Supreme Majesty will permit, I will say that this last may be the only certain fact, but it’s useless, because all those Southerners eat badly and are riddled with chronic ailments and deficiencies of all sorts. For the same reason I am of the opinion that he cannot be as tall as they say.”

“Where is he?”

“At the present moment, my Lord, this is not known, but we have documented his passage through the following towns.”

“The towns don’t matter,” said the emperor. “What I want to know is what this individual intends to do and what forces he has.”

“The reports, my Lord, are incomplete and inconclusive on those points.”

The emperor went into a fit of rage. When he calmed down, red-faced and shaky, and let his ministers go on talking, all he could find out was that the South was not disturbed, but rather too quiet; that of the thousands of spies sent into the South perhaps half a dozen remained alive, and those few had escaped and were in the capital, rendered useless by terror, bewitched perhaps, hidden, writing reports and collecting wages; that the Southerners were moving about from town to town with unusual frequency; that they had no organized army, and that the whole South was repeating one phrase, a watchword no doubt, though it wasn’t changed daily as was proper: It hasn’t all been said.

“It means revolution, no doubt of it,” said the minister of war.

“I realize that, Lord Minister, I am not an idiot,” said the emperor, who perhaps was not such an idiot but who did not realize anything.

Never before had the North marched against the South without cause. Well, this time, they did.

While orders went out from the capital to all the Northern camps and garrisons, the people in the Southern towns waited for the man who was going to come. If in some village some kid asked who and how and why and where from and what for, his parents, his grandparents, his uncles if he’d lost his parents, answered: “He who went away has returned.”

The littlest ones or the most innocent ones persisted: “And is he going to come stay with us?”

And the older people smiled and said, “He went away and has returned, and he goes and returns, and will go and will return.”

“But why?”

“Because it hasn’t all been said.”

About the time the fatuous emperor ordered fine embroidered robes to wear over his armor, the man who was walking through the hot green South and who had now known lake cities and tree cities and secret cities underground, in hollow trees and hidden by poisonous plants and giant ant hills, took his way almost to the limit which very few have ever reached if in truth anyone ever reached it, and turned back in the other direction, and talked with men, and women talked to him, and he saw the Twenty-Ninth Dance, which is called Before Waking, and the Twelfth, Mastery of Ignorance, and the Second, Complications of a Hand, and the Eleventh, An Oil Lamp is not a Cowbell, and the Seventeenth, The Place, and much more. About the time the armies were gathered and the generals getting impatient and the emperor was seeking a pretext for delaying departure even if only for a day, just one more day, he came to a silent town. It hadn’t rained for a long time in that region, and everything seemed covered with dust and ash. Only as he entered the place did he realize he was in a dead city.

In the North, in the rich elegant capital, in the marble palace with blue translucent roofs and domes of copper and gold, the Emperor Sebbredel IV said at last, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow at daybreak.”

And in the South, in the dead city, a man entered the houses of wood and straw, frightened off the carrion-eaters with a stick, and, sorehearted and weary, buried the dead under the sheltering trees. In the North the eleventh ruler of the House of the Bbredasoës put on his armor and over it a robe of blue velvet embroidered with pearls and silver thread, and in the South the man who came and went away gave water to the sole survivor of the plague.

The North threw flowers before the Imperial armies and Sebbredel IV became increasingly cheerful. His armor was heavy and awkward, to be sure, but it gave him the comforting sense of being invulnerable, almost immortal, as an emperor beloved by his people should be. What could a few ragged, sick, superstitious tramps do against the most powerful army led to certain victory by the most powerful ruler of the greatest empire known to man? We’ll destroy them in the first encounter, the minister of war assured him. The Department of Revenues is going to ask Your Supreme Highness’s approval of new taxes to cover the costs of the expedition without burdening the Treasury, said the minister of finance. And the emperor said to himself that as soon as they got back he would bestow new titles on these capable and loyal officials.

The two men on foot entered the village at midday, and people came to welcome them. Maannda told of the plague and how he had returned from death. That night they were eating under the eaves of a house and in front of them sat a woman of the South, a dark woman, big, ponderous, getting old, who walked very erect and spoke in a soft voice. “They say armed men are coming, a lot of them, from up there, from the house of power,” she said.

He went on eating, but Maannda set his bowl on the ground. “Again?”

“What do you mean, ‘again,’ little man?” said the woman. “Maybe you’ve seen armed men from the North before?”

“Not I,” Maannda said, “but my grandfather’s grandfather saw them.”

“This time is different,” the woman said. “This time we aren’t going to die, but to fight. This time the one who had to come has come.”

He looked up then. He said, “I’m not going to fight.”

“No?” said she.

“How can you not fight?” Maannda asked. “You buried the dead, you listened to the women, you held up the roof of the house, I was dead and you brought me back.”

“You weren’t dead,” he said.

“Yes I was,” Maannda insisted, “I was dead, I’m the one who knows that best, aren’t I? And you came and you went and you refused weapons and you forgot your names and you knew your name—how can you not fight?”

And a young girl, not young enough to hum like Genna and not old enough to sit in judgment, left the villagers who surrounded them, and came up to where he sat with Maannda and the blind woman, and everyone was silent and listened.

“But all has not been said,” she said, “for words are the shadow and the light of things and things are only what is being born and being;

And so when there is no bread we need only sit and await the new day, and the new day will bring us bread;

In the heart of the hungry man despair lays its traps and the man weeps and curses;

But all is not said,

And a man does ill to weep and curse when to sit and hope is well;