Kalpa Imperial (3 page)

All this happened in one lifetime, yes, my dear friends, it really did. A long life, very long, but one life. Emperor Bibaraïn I married twice and had fourteen children, six boys and eight girls. He never learned to read and write: he said he didn’t need to, and maybe he was right. But he didn’t remain ignorant of anything about him. His second wife, the Empress Dalayya, learned reading and writing at fifteen, and at thirty had written four volumes of chronicles in which was recorded all that the excavations revealed about the old Empire, with precise details, and interpretations which were mostly mistaken but full of beauty and imagination. One of his sons was a mathematician and another a poet who sang of his father’s incredible life and the death of the old Empire, as he, who had seen it reborn, felt it might have been. All the children were intelligent, enlightened, and competent. And one daughter was as inquisitive and disobedient as a boy called Bib, in a tribe of semi-nomadic barbarians, had once been.

They say, I can’t verify it, my good friends, but they say that when death came the old Emperor Bibaraïn saw it coming and smiled and asked it to wait a bit for him, and death waited. Not long, but it waited. The old Lord of the new Empire seated himself on the Golden Throne, called his wife, his children, his grandchildren, his ministers, and his servants, and told them he was dying. Nobody wanted to believe him; his eyes were so bright, his head so erect, his voice so clear, that nobody could believe him. Nobody except a girl who’d been ordered to wash her hands and comb her hair and put on some clean clothes before she came to see her august father. Having done none of these things, she tried to hide behind her older brothers. But she believed him. Old Bibaraïn I, The Flute-Player, smiled and said that he declared the inheritor of his throne to be his daughter Mainaleaä. He named her mother the Empress Dalayya as regent until the tangle-haired girl reached her majority. And while a scribe labored with quill and paper so that the emperor could sign the decree of succession and the order to maintain the ancient palace as long as possible, the old lord took his flute and began to play. When the scribe brought him the decree, the emperor signed it and then went on playing the flute until he remembered that death was waiting for him. He raised his eyes in the midst of a very high note, looked at death, and winked. Death came to him, and the old lord died, playing his flute, seated on the Golden Throne that had belonged to the lords of the greatest and most ancient empire ever known.

The Two Hands

What Blaise Pascal said:
Car il est malheureux, tout roi qu’il est, s’il y pense.

The storyteller said: Between the dynasty of the Oróbeles, called the Dark Princes, and that of the Three Hundred Kings, of whom there were in fact only twelve if you count the child who reigned for a single day, the imperial throne was held by a nameless usurper. He came from the south, was drawn into the palace by the tides of war, and never came out again. Some people say he’s still there, which is not impossible, as you’ll see. The tale of his life and works is banal, sorry, and inconclusive. Have any of you ever gone near the imperial palace? Have you seen the towers, the immeasurable terraces, the black walls, the fountains? No, nor have I, and even now it’s very hard to do so. That’s why this story belongs to other people. I’m the one they give presents to and butter up to get me to tell about old, forgotten things. But this time, though it probably won’t work, I’m going to try—why not?—to say nothing.

What the Archivist said:
I live my life, gentlemen, in folio. I have seen nothing and read everything. Your life, too, is written down, it’s catalogued, classified, and archived, and if your wife wants to know about your childhood she need only come to me: I can take it down from the proper shelf and spread it out before her. Now, as for the Dark Princes, gentlemen, there were seven of them. They were aristocrats, not strong enough to be good rulers. They married within the family, uncle with niece, cousin with cousin, brother with sister. The last of the Dark Princes was a babbling, snivelling idiot, uselessly married to one of the most beautiful women that ever walked the earth. He was blind to that. He took little interest in the history of his race and less in that of his people. He ate little, slept less, and welcomed every fortune-teller, augur, priest, mage, alchemist, inventor, and charlatan who asked to see him. He was called Orbad and appeared in imperial decrees as the Great, the Powerful, and above all, the Mysterious. But he had very little resemblance to Or, or it may have been Oróbel, the first of the Dark Princes, a black-skinned, filthy, frightful giant of a man, who fouled the marbles of the palace when he came back from hunting or fighting or chasing after women. One day somebody came to the palace who did look like Or, and I wonder if it wasn’t actually Or himself, and the next day Orbad the Great, the Mysterious, the Idiot, was dead.

What the chambermaid said:
The empress was so beautiful! I can’t remember what her name was any more, but she was so beautiful, and a virgin all her life. Such a pity! I can say that, I’ve buried three husbands and never bothered to be faithful to any of them. Well, so, she came, the empress came to the imperial palace, two days after the coronation of Orbad the Mysterious. They say she came from that fortress where they raised beautiful women the way they raised cattle, where they never let any stranger enter except a certain Smith. But that seems unlikely, because Smith himself explained afterwards why no woman ever left there. But maybe it was true, maybe she escaped from the Alendar, or they let her escape. She arrived in a carriage and with a retinue. She was veiled and dressed in purple. That very day they got her married to the emperor. They got her married, I say, because when she saw him, white as a worm, feeble, with red eyes and trembling hands, she found him disgusting. But she was well brought up, she’d been educated for the throne. She spent her wedding night sitting on a footstool, in a white tunic bordered with gold, a wreath of flowers on her head, waiting, by the light of a single lamp. The next night she waited again; I brought her fresh flowers for the wreath. And after that she didn’t wait any more. She always locked her door from inside, though there wasn’t any need. When the warrior came, two years after that, she was just as beautiful as ever, and she saw him from the balcony. She still locked her door, but the warrior was very strong. I never saw her again.

What the officer of the guard said:
If you’ve been in the service awhile you get a kind of nose for it, like a dog; you learn to know who to let pass and who gets stopped. You know who’s dangerous, who’s harmless. You just know it, it’s not something you figure out. He was one of the ones you let pass, and yet he was dangerous. It never happened like that before. Either they were wandering fortune-tellers, and they were allowed into the palace, we had to let them in, or they were adventurers hoping for a gain, and those we stopped at the gates, or sometimes we killed them out in the thickets because we were bored or it was hot and we were in a bad mood. We saw a cloud of dust and the watch said it was a big force. But they camped on the other side of the river. The dust was settling. He came alone, on foot. My height, younger than me. He was armed, but dressed like a priest, not like a soldier. He walked slowly up to us and said he wanted to see the emperor. My men looked at me. I knew that he could go in and that he shouldn’t go in. To gain time I told him that he couldn’t go in carrying weapons. He clapped his sword down on the ground and took two daggers out from under his robes. I asked him what he wanted and he told me that he held the emperor’s future in his hands. I’d heard that story often enough, but this time I believed it. I let him go in. I put a subaltern in charge of the guards and followed the warrior. A porter showed him the way. The soldiers in the passage led him into the great room, and there he saw the emperor. Orbad the Mysterious was a weakling who cried at everything. He cried this time, too, when the warrior showed him his life. I mean, he went up the steps to the throne without bowing or saluting and asked for a bowl of clear water. The emperor, quaking in his boots, made a gesture and they brought the man a bowl of clear water. He took it in the hollow of his hand and put it under the emperor’s eyes and the emperor started crying. I left. They say he saw the future, but somebody lied. Because they say he saw himself, the emperor, ruler of the whole world, covered with glory and honor, and the next day he was dead; or he didn’t see any of that, or he saw it but it was false. Anyhow, the next day he was dead. Then the warrior climbed up on the wall and made his rings shine in the sun and his troops across the river saw him and came and surrounded the palace. And the warrior went back to the throne room and took hold of the scepter and the crown and said that now he was the emperor.

What the fisherman said:
I never saw any emperor. We live down the river, in houses on the mud. We fish at night. We salt the fish and sell it. We marry women from other houses on the mud. We have kids and they grow up and help us fish. When our kids are grown up we die.

The storyteller said:
At first he was just one of the usurpers in the long, long history of the Empire. He seemed no different from his predecessors: he had Orbad the Idiot buried with pomp, his troops took over the fort, and life went on as before. The man who was now emperor stopped often before the door of the woman who had been empress, but he never spoke. He worked day and night, and under his rule good turned to evil with amazing speed. He did a lot for the Empire and everything he did led to ruin, which didn’t seem to bother him. He had a dam built, for instance, and thousands of families had to escape the flooding and wandered about with nowhere to settle and died of hunger in the wilderness. He enlarged the frontiers, and the conquered territories rebelled and the killing went for years. He was so busy that he ate and slept in the throne room, where officials brought the problems of the Empire to him and came away with ruinous solutions. And then the woman who had been empress died and was buried in the Garden of the Dead, and the emperor shut himself up in her apartments, where he was more comfortable, having at least a decent bed to sleep in, and where he was alone. Fewer and fewer functionaries came to see him. They were afraid of him. It got so they sent one man with messages from all the others, and finally not even that; they left notices about this and that in front of the door. A few hours later, they’d find the emperor’s decrees and orders in the same place. Fear is contagious. Soon the whole Empire trembled just at the the title, not even the name, of the man locked in the innermost room of the palace, at whose feet blood flowed as easily as water in a river. I can imagine him sitting there in the half-darkness seeing nothing but the destiny of the Empire. They might have forgotten him, but he didn’t let them forget. Locked away in that room, he went to war at the head of the armies, he executed the condemned, he raped women, he built advance posts, he burned harvests, he sowed fields with salt, he changed the course of rivers, he declared wars, he dried up marshes, he invaded nations. Never were there so many ministers with such short terms of office, so many deaths, so many women made pregnant. Never had the streets been so empty or the labor camps so full. Never had there been so many denunciations, so much torture, so much grief. And it went on for twenty years. A long, long time, surely, for the man locked in the room, and a long time for those outside it. Yet it’s a fact that nobody got in to see him. Plenty of people had seen him earlier, of course, and in twenty years there were plenty of bold or audacious or simply well-meaning people who tried to see him. And so there arose a legend, a multiple legend: everybody in the palace, in the city, in the Empire, knew somebody who knew somebody who had seen the emperor. In the marketplace, the gambling hall, at a table in the coffee shop, there was always some blowhard who could describe him in great detail. If you listened to them you’d end up knowing that the emperor was fair, dark, tall, short, fat, thin, bald, hairy, feeble, muscular, old, and young. Oddly enough, every one of them said that he had empty eyes, veiled eyes, eyes that seemed to gaze through an opaque liquid. Twenty years, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, twenty years he reigned from inside that room and never let himself be seen and never let anybody in.

What the Archivist said:
All that’s as true and as false as any tale. In the first place, a great many people had known him before he shut himself up in the inner room of the palace, and they weren’t all dead, like the woman who had been empress. In the second place, it’s possible that some people who claimed to have seen him during those twenty years were telling the truth. If we can imagine him locked up in the half-darkness, his empty eyes fixed on something unseen, it’s just as easy to imagine him wandering about the palace, through the city streets, in the small hours when everybody’s asleep or trying to sleep. And in the third place, he received one visitor. Of this there is no possible doubt. I know that it would be pleasing and suitable to say that his visitor was a mighty warrior or a great sorcerer, so that history could repeat itself and philosophers could draw conclusions from it. But what would become of the Annals of the Empire if we archivists started spinning fantasies like the storytellers? No. It was a beggar, lean, lousy, filthy, leprous. He arrived at the palace along with the crowds of curious yokels that came from every corner of the Empire to see the house of power. He told a porter that he wanted to see the emperor, and the porter laughed, holding his big paunch and showing the cavities in his back teeth. But the beggar stayed, and nobody drove him away. He stayed day after day, night after night, sitting in the anteroom, waiting. The women gave him something to eat now and then. He slept in his rags on the marble pavement. Everybody got used to seeing him there, and his presence was suitably recorded in the proper folio, until the emperor took notice of his presence. Nothing strange about that; the emperor knew everything. He knew much more, now that he’d gone into the bedchamber to die, however long and slow his death agony, than when he galloped over the plains of the South, or paced the palace corridors pausing a moment before the locked door of the woman who had been empress, or when he called the ministers together in the throne room. And one morning the door was opened, and the beggar went into the bedchamber. A maidservant bringing breakfast saw, and showed the others, the tracks of the leper’s dirty feet crossing the threshold of the emperor’s room. They stood about in the anteroom, silent, and I tell you it wasn’t long before the door was opened again. The beggar came out, passed through the anteroom, the courtyard, the gates, and was lost to sight forever. Next day the notices and dispatches disappeared as usual, but there was only one decree, an insignificant one concerning the cleanliness of public wells. And the next day, nobody picked up the notices, and the day after that, and the day after that. On the fourth day the stench was intolerable, but none of them dared go into the room. They simply left off hanging around that door, first the ministers, then the secretaries, the officials, the priests, the scholars, finally the cleaning staff. Grass grew in the dirt that gathered on the marble, until at last, when the stench was fading, the first of the Three Hundred Kings seated himself on the throne of the Empire.

The storyteller said:
No, I don’t know who the visitor was, nor do I know what the two of them said in that room. Since I’m not an archivist I could make up a thousand identities, a thousand conversations, but what’s the good? I’m an old man and every day it gets harder for me to talk for long. Anyhow, people make up things for themselves, they don’t need me as much as they think they do. I’ve heard many versions, and I’ll tell the two that I’ve dreamed most about. In the first version, the visitor was the emperor himself, the man he would have been if he hadn’t been a soldier, a captain, a general, a usurper. In that case, they wouldn’t have needed to talk at all. In the second version the visitor was death. In that case, it’s useless to try and imagine what they said. I think both versions are true, just as true as all the other versions running around the Empire. Because who’s the only one who can see the hidden emperor even without seeing him? Who’s the only one who can take on the vilest appearance without losing his power and glory? Who’s the only one totally indifferent to the destiny of a man and an Empire simply through being who he is? I ask you that, and then I fall silent and go away, leaving you to ponder the arrogance of an old storyteller: who is it that talks with blind poets, with fishermen who die every day in their huts on the mud, with unhappy women, with tellers of tales?