Kalpa Imperial (20 page)

“But don’t you see that this man is evil?”

“He may be.”

“Don’t doctors fight against evil? Don’t they want to do good?”

“Yes.”

“So? What does he have to draw, or think, or eat, that will make him ill?”

“My teacher taught me many things,” the doctor said. “But the day I left my house to go live in his, that day I learned to wash the pots and pans in the kitchen and how to tell a spider who’s going to lay eggs from a spider going hunting.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with Zigud-da’s death.”

“Yes, you do, Veevil. With a very little effort, you do see. Even if maybe you don’t want to see it.”

“If Zigud-da gets sick and dies, I’ll leave my house and come to yours forever.”

The doctor felt a piercing pain in his chest.

“I can learn to wash pots and pans,” she said, “and all about spiders and herbs. And I can help you with your patients and keep you company and keep the house clean and give you lovely strong healthy children.”

“And what would the two of us talk about on winter nights, Veevil, when we were alone, in the lamp light, in the kitchen?”

“Does that mean you won’t make him get sick and die?”

“I don’t know,” the doctor said.

She stood up and looked at the clay bowl. She reached out, took the wooden spoon, and buried it in the thick, shiny pudding.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said, “if you’ll think about everything I said.”

“Yes.”

The old doctor, who had been alone all his life, as other men with other jobs are alone all their lives, poets, twentiers, storytellers—the old doctor slept alone that night in his narrow bed, a restless and unquiet sleep. Twice he woke for no reason, and twice got up and went to look at his patients. It seemed to him, while he was putting a pitcher of fresh water by the bedside of one of them, a boy with an authoritarian father and a throat condition, it seemed to him that Veevil had not left but was still there with him in the white house.

But the girl was in fact off in an abandoned warehouse near the river, speaking low and fast, surrounded by people listening to her; and when she left there very late, almost at daybreak, she had hidden in a pocket of her coat a little silver box in which was a fine white powder.

Since the emperor loved his palace, that morning he sent for the captain of the Imperial Guard and held a long conversation with him.

“If His Imperial Majesty approves,” said Zigud-da, “we shall set off this afternoon. We shall camp at Tusugga and make a surprise attack on Sid-Ballein tomorrow at noon when the inhabitants are eating or resting.”

The emperor approved. Zigud-da gave orders to his men, then left the palace and went to the house in Whiterose Street. He had to wait under the vines because, in the room with the mat-covered stone floor, the doctor was talking with someone. What the captain of the Guard thought as he waited is something no one will ever know. But the probability is that he was impatient; and since he was no longer ill, it’s also probable that he had forgotten about the broom-palms and instead of the green leaves swaying in the wind and shining in the sun he remembered a game he used to play as a child in the dusty streets of Eriamod or the skills he’d had to demonstrate to be admitted into the Imperial Guard. What we do know is that when a fat woman came out of the room, wobbling over the flagstones with unsteady steps, he went on waiting for the doctor to call him, and hearing nothing for a long while, approached the door and went in.

“Good day,” said the doctor.

“Good day,” and he sat down.

“You’re not sick any more.”

“No,” Zigud-da said, “I don’t have any pain here and the cold burning doesn’t come up from my stomach.”

As the doctor said nothing, the captain of the Imperial Guard went on: “What should I do now? Should I go on drawing trees?”

“Would you like to?”

“No. It takes too much time. And later today I have to do some traveling.”

“No more sketches, then. And your bedroom furniture can go back where it was. Don’t take any more of the medicine I gave you. What you can do is look closely at the trees you see along the way as you travel. And for three days, take this other medicine I’ve prepared for you.”

The doctor got up, left the captain alone, and went to a room that opened on the courtyard of the fountain, facing the rooms where his patients were. There he chose a flask, went out and recrossed the courtyard. But before he came to the vine-wreathed arcade , the sunlight shone on the glass flask and the liquid in it, and the doctor stopped. For a moment he felt again the sharp pain he felt last night in the kitchen facing Veevil. He clenched his hand on the flask, went into the room and sat down on the mat. He said to the man who was waiting there, “No, don’t take anything. It will be better.”

“But what if I get sick again?”

“That is possible. All of us could take ill at any moment. All the same I think that you won’t get sick again for a long time; there are other ways of preventing the illness you had. While you’re traveling you’ll feel well, and when you come back you’re going to buy some sessely seeds, dry them in the sun, grind them and keep them in a cool dry place, and use them once a month to season your food.”

The man stood up. “Nothing else?”

“Nothing else.”

“Good. What do I owe you?”

“At the moment, nothing. If it ever occurs to you that you’re in my debt, then you’ll know what to bring me.”

“And if it doesn’t occur to me?”

“Then we’ll see,” said the doctor.

“Goodbye,” said Captain Zigud-da, and left.

Perhaps the story of the man who lived in a house on Whiterose Street with the door always ajar, which people said used to be a brothel and a pilgrims’ inn, and which had a buried treasure hidden in the courtyard, ought to end here. I ask myself if that would not be the most fitting. But the most fitting isn’t always what we like best, and sometimes we storytellers find it hard to finish, to be done with a story. So I’ll go on and tell you that the old doctor buried in the garden, in a deep hole, the flask that should have held a clear transparent liquid and which held instead a thick liquid full of sediment. And that same night he told Veevil two things: that what is called evil is also necessary, and that the world is immensely rich and varied yet is one and the same because the most disparate things are brothers and the things farthest apart are equivalent. What the girl replied to this doesn’t matter; she left, and never jumped over the garden wall again.

I’ll also tell you that Chaloumell the Bald died soon after, passing from one of his fainting fits to death with only a shudder and a cry, but that the Chaixis dynasty didn’t end with him. His eldest son ascended to the throne, Cheirantes III, known to history by the disrespectful nickname Mad Horse, who married the second daughter of the Duke of N’Cevvilea but almost immediately took as his concubine one of the girls from Sid-Ballein who was working on the new additions to the palace. This was the pretext for an uprising of the Imperial Guard, who declared it unfitting that a prisoner whom they had brought as a slave from afar should be given a high position at court. Mad Horse pretended to be cowed by the rebellion, promised to surrender, and asked for a secret meeting with the ringleaders to plead for his life. The meeting was to be in a pavilion near the palace, but none of the leaders of the uprising got that far. They fell into a deep pit dug in the woods surrounding the pavilion built by the second Chaixis emperor for one of his mistresses, and the brilliant Lord of the Golden Throne entertained himself by cutting their throats until his arm got tired, and left the rest there in the pit to die of hunger and thirst. The girl from Sid-Ballein bore the emperor the only son he had, since the empress never conceived, some said because she was barren, others, because the emperor never lay with her. And this only son of the Mad Horse was the Emperor Cheanoth I, whom the Empire will not soon forget, for of all the wise, just men who have sat on the Golden Throne, he was one of the best.

And one day that boy who wanted to learn the names of the flowers that grow in the cold mountains of the North came back to the house in Whiterose Street, and didn’t leave it again, but stayed as apprentice. And when his master died, he, being then a man grown, went on practicing medicine and watching the world, sitting in the evening beside the pool that reflected the treasure buried in the courtyard and the limitless boundaries of the house.

Basic Weapons

The storyteller said: But if we want to understand, really understand, the history of the Emperor Horhórides III, seventh ruler of the House of the Jénningses, we must pause to recall that the years he lived in were hardly peaceful ones. All the Jénningses emperors had turbulent souls and contorted minds, and turbulent and contorted was the age when they occupied the Golden Throne. Horhórides III’s period was less troubled, perhaps, but even more extravagant. There was no war, no famine, no plague: but vice flourished, as did smuggling, assassination, greed, hypocrisy, and the arts of the hideous. In short, there was no happiness, no innocence. Maybe the plague would have been preferable. And to demonstrate this, I leave the emperor for a little while to tell you a brief story; for a good story saves long explanations, and I, who have told so many, assure you that this is a good one.

Master Bramaltariq had seventeen horses, nine wives, and three bearskin cloaks, one dyed green, one purple, and one blue. In the wretched alley called The Eagle was a shop of curiosities, and curiosities was certainly the word for them, whose owner was named Drondlann: he had a round bald head, a short neck, long powerful arms, and a massive body without an ounce of fat on it. He had no legs, but an ingenious harness attached two wheels to him, which he pushed with his arms, thus propelling himself quickly and silently. Nobody knew how he had lost his legs: if in a fight, or an accident, or if he’d been born so.

When Master Bramaltariq passed through the High Street with his cortege, Drondlann gave a push to his wheels and left his den to go hide among the trees bordering the avenue and watch. Master Bramaltariq’s wives were very white and very plump, and sat on gilt pillows with colored tassels. He hired out his stallions to country folk who had only mares; he kept the colts. He lived in a big stone house built in the middle of a lake of black water; it had verandas of carved wood, mirrors in the ceilings, curtains in the windows, and torch-lit hidey-holes mined with traps. Drondlann had no horses nor bearskin cloaks; all he had was the curiosity shop and his two wheels and a plant of hatred in his belly which he watered carefully every day. He watched Master Bramaltariq go by with his wives and servants, and the plant thrust its flowers into his throat and wrists. He told himself that he was as good a man as that soft fatty, and better, recalling how when he made a lucky sale, he’d go find a certain dark, thin, weatherbeaten prostitute, a bit of scum from the dregs of the slums, who’d leave next morning with a small share of the money and two bruised furrows in her thighs.

Nobody knew anything for sure about where Drondlann got his merchandise. But it was known that it was Grugroul who brought him the blond boy. Around then the sale of dwarfs had fallen off; they were a drug on the market when, only two seasons back, everybody was mad to have at least one dwarf chained at the street door or in a cage hung from the drawing room ceiling. About the time Master Bramaltariq acquired his ninth wife, Drondlann began to stop doing business with the people who came to Eagle Alley to sell dwarfs.

“I don’t want dwarfs,” he told them, “they’re not selling.”

“Giants,” one of these disappointed salesmen proposed, “giants, huh? What do you think? If dwarfs aren’t selling, giants will, huh? Because a giant’s the opposite of a dwarf, right, huh?”

Drondlann didn’t kick the stupid man out the door, though he considered it carefully and thoroughly, as he considered everything.

“No,” he said finally, “no, no giants. Out. Out of here, and don’t come back. Unless,” and he smiled, “unless you bring me something really out of the ordinary.”

The cripple of Eagle Alley was hoping that somebody would bring him something rare enough to justify the long trip to the bridge that ran from the lakeshore to the stone house on the islet, so that he could offer it to Master Bramaltariq. He wanted to hear the stallions neighing and see the plump women reclining on wrinkled silken carpets. He wanted to smell the incense burning in niches and look up to see his own reflection in the mirrored ceilings. He wanted to look at the black lake from the house, roll along the polished floors, spy, and water the plant in his belly.

The salesman told somebody what the dealer wanted, and that somebody told another somebody, and so on until it got to Grugroul.

A few days later a winged fetus was brought to Eagle Alley. It was unfortunately dead. But Drondlann paid a few coins for it and promptly, before it began to rot, sold it to a man in a hood who said he wanted it for his master, a sufficiently dubious claim. Drondlann assured him that since the creature had a leathery skin it would last a good while. The hooded man never came back. Then a six-legged dragon was brought to him. He could neither sell it nor feed it. The animal refused rats, tender shoots, birds, mushrooms, spiders, and hot coals, and so died of starvation. The dealer thought that he’d been most unwise not to ask the seller what six-legged dragons ate, having simply assumed that it ate what four-legged ones did. Another day he was offered a white snake with gills and antennae, but, recalling the dragon, he refused it. He bought a hermaphrodite and two children without ears or eyes and sold all three at a good price, even though one of the kids did nothing but moan and sob, but sad to say, there are people who like things like that. He also bought a blond dragonfly that lived on filth and excrement. He clipped her fore-wings to prevent her escaping and so let her loose in the shop much of the time. He tried to have sex with her and she offered no resistance, but when he saw what her belly ended in between the hindmost legs, he withdrew, feeling rather sick. She did not appear to be offended. She wasn’t easy to sell, but he didn’t worry about it since not only did it cost nothing to feed her but she disposed of all kinds of filth and nasty stuff, and he had a kind of fondness for her. In the end he put her at half price, a real steal for anybody who wanted a blond dragonfly in the house, and The Riuder of the Water Pyramid bought her, conveniently preventing people from saying Drondlann had unsaleable items in his shop. And so with other things, nothing extraordinary, nothing he could go offer at the house on the lake, till the day Grugroul came with the boy. The owner of the curiosity shop thought the boy belonged to the salesman and didn’t look at him.

“I’ll sell him to you,” Grugroul said.

Drondlann didn’t bother to turn his head; he was astute enough to have learned not to examine the merchandise, whatever it might be. If there was nothing special about the boy, as he thought, it wasn’t worth the trouble to twist his neck, and if there was, to show interest might be counterproductive.

“Not interested,” he said.

Grugroul smiled. “You’re going to miss something exceptional,” he said.

So then the merchant of Eagle Alley turned his head slowly, very slowly, and looked at the merchandise. He shrugged. “Why would I want that?”

For he saw a boy, just a boy—complete, nothing missing, nothing added. Blond, two bright eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, teeth, two arms, two hands, body, two legs, two feet. Drondlann turned his back and began to clean the cages.

“He doesn’t talk,” Grugroul said.

“Big deal.”

He opened the door of the cage that held the giant bat that a young scholar who didn’t wish to give his name had promised to come for tomorrow, and took out the bowl to change the water.

“He knows how to dance,” Grugroul persisted.

Now this did surprise the dealer. The word echoed in his head: dance, dance.

“Dance,” he repeated. “What’s that?”

He hadn’t forgotten his caution; but he had, now and then, encountered and sold an article that seemed commonplace but wasn’t. The Dame of the Hill, for instance, widow of The Jungaï of the Silos, had gone mad, or so it was said though nobody was sure, after keeping in her house for a month an old man she’d bought from him to feed her birds. Since the old man didn’t live at the same time as the Dame but a few minutes ahead of her, he answered her questions before she asked them, or talked about things that began happening as he was finishing his sentence. And Adanssanto of the Tunnels had killed his adopted son, a newborn infant that Drondlann had fetched from the marshes of the South, because he claimed the infant produced dreams. Or a dream. At any rate he was declared not guilty, because the infant came, after all, from the South. But the whole affair had been a bother and a waste of time, and Adanssanto of the Tunnels had never fully recovered.

“What’s dancing?” he repeated in surprise, holding the dirty water dish in his hand.

Grugroul, who was no fool either, saw the dealer in curiosities was interested, intrigued.

“You’ll see,” he said. “This boy moves his body not only the way we do to walk or bathe or get into a cart, but in a special way: he puts it in an infinite number of positions, each lasting a few seconds or fractions of a second, and all the positions are different, or are repeated in long series. And he goes on doing it till he’s ordered to stop.”

Drondlann of the Wheels lost all interest. This dancing business sounded stupid. He plunged the dirty dish into the water bucket. This time, though he still didn’t know it, he had behaved stupidly. Grugroul clapped his hands. He cried, “Tattoot! Dance!”

Then the boy did what the salesman had described: he danced. He moved first without changing place, both feet as if fixed to the ground. He waved his arms, lifted them, held them out; he swayed, and he made circles with his body, twisting his waist, and with his head, that seemed to turn freely at the end of his long neck. Then he leapt, without ceasing to sway the rest of his body. He spun on one foot, on the other, bowed down, swept the ground with his hands, straightened up, ran two steps to one side, three to the other, his arms held high, his head fallen back. Grugroul had stepped aside and turned his back, looking out into the alley through the shop window. And the dealer? He had felt the world begin to spin quicker than it had ever done, more dizzily than when it was an incandescent lump of rock trailing gases and gathering dust under the attentive eye of God. The dealer had seen the dead risen from their graves, had smelled all the odors earth exhaled, from the deserts to the orchards, had seen a black army march across a petrified sea, had picked the flowers of childhood running barefoot, had ridden in golden armor across a golden field pursuing golden women, had been drunken with liquors distilled deep in hidden caves, and when the sky began to come collapsing down on his shoulders, the water dish dropped from his hands and smashed to bits, and the giant bat gave a croak.

“Enough!” Drondlann yelled.

Grugroul clapped his hands. The boy stood still. Only then did Grugroul turn round. “What do you think?” he said.

Caution abandoned the dealer of Eagle Alley. Master Bramaltariq was old, fat, hairy, soft, and weak. He had nine young wives. He had swollen veins in his legs, he had protruding eyes from labored breathing and sluggish digestion.

“How much?”

Till noon they sat haggling over the boy. At noon, exhausted, each torn between the conviction he’d been swindled and the hope he’d swindled the other, they parted. Grugroul went back to his inn and by evening was on his way south, and Drondlann found another water dish for the bat, cleaned the cages, swept up, and spent most of the afternoon thinking.

The water of the lake was black and very still. No fishermen or boatmen worked out that way. The dealer in curiosities arrived in his donkey-cart, and two servants carried him upstairs. They were getting to the top, only three steps to go, two, one, they were almost there, when in the distance the seventeen horses neighed. Drondlann’s hands clenched behind the servants’ necks and his whole body became tense and hard as he said to himself that he was an idiot, and in that moment between one step and the next he changed the plan that had brought him there.

“No, I won’t sell him to you,” he said to Master Bramaltariq after describing the boy. “I wouldn’t sell him for all the gold in the world. Never. He’s like my own flesh and blood. I’ve had him by my side since he was born and he’s like my own son now, and I love him as such. I swear by all that’s sacred that it destroys my soul to have to do this. But times are hard, misery is knocking at my door. I’ll rent him to you.”

“What’s that, have to see, how’s that,” muttered the old man, distrustful like all old men.

“I’ll rent him to you,” repeated Drondlann. “You’ll give me money, not to keep him, but to see him. I bring him one day, you watch him dance, I get my money, I take him away. Another day I bring him, you see him dance.”

“Who’ll feed him?” the master interrupted.

Drondlann was not looking at the women reclining on pillows and carpets. He tried to keep his eyes on the face of the old man, and saw him agitated, moving restlessly, his little sharp eyes shifting, his lips half open.

“I will,” he said.

The fat man thought the bargain was good and the dealer a fool. He accepted.

Five times after that the dealer in curiosities came from Eagle Alley to Master Bramaltariq’s stone house on the lake. The first time was at evening. The sky was red, the horses were silent, the water looked still and black as a sheet of cast iron.

“Dance, Tattoot!” he cried.

The dealer knew the boy never repeated the patterns he made with his body; he knew it because he had watched him secretly in the house in Eagle Alley, making him dance once and again. But here, in the stone house on the lake, he did not watch him. He knew that if he himself fell into the trap, he’d lose everything. So the blond boy danced in the high salon and Drondlann kept his eyes on Master Bramaltariq and the women. The plump white women tried to stand up, opened their mouths, wept, moved their heads, stretched out their hands, groaned, screamed. But none of this affected fat Master Bramaltariq: he was rigid, desperate, staring at the boy. His face seemed to swell, the features trembling and melting like those of a corpse hanged a long time ago. And the arms and legs of the boy went on filling the room with flights, ciphers, dreams, memories, guilt, hunger, fever. Two of the women were crawling on the floor, another fell back on the cushions with her eyes closed and her tongue hanging out. Master Bramaltariq was apoplectic. The dealer clapped his hands, motioned to the boy to follow him, and left.