Kalpa Imperial (16 page)

The whole Empire looked with distrust on this woman of whom little was known and much spoken, young, not beautiful, not an aristocrat, a rich merchant’s widow, hard, not delicately educated nor marvelously elegant, and they asked what disasters she’d cause, how many of her relatives she’d make ministers and generals, what luxuries or vices she’d spend money on, how much longer the sick emperor would live now. The whole Empire was mistaken. There were no new ministers or generals, no wild orgies, no lovers, no poison in the emperor’s soup. Everything went on as before, or at least seemed to. At first the empress was no more than she’d been before, a confidante or counselor. She sat on the throne beside the emperor; she came to his bed sometimes, though the disease in his blood kept him from doing anything but talking with her or sleeping by her side, so that it appeared that he would indeed die childless and his dynasty would end with him; she appeared at official ceremonies; and that was all. She began by employing her energy for herself: she learned to read and write, to speak all the dialects of the Empire, she learned law, economics, mathematics, though she didn’t want to hear anything about chemistry or astronomy; she learned geography and strategy, and summoned a storyteller, a young man who’d recently begun practicing his trade in the streets and squares, to tell her about those who had sat before her on the Golden Throne.

At the end of two or three years, Abderjhalda knew a great deal, the people were already calling her the Great Empress, and the emperor left the government in her hands while his illness slowly grew worse. The time came when he was rarely able to get up, dress, walk, or eat without help. Yet he lived several years more. The Great Empress looked after him herself: she chose his doctors and attendants, checked that his medicines were given, that he ate as he should and received the injections and cauteries and treatments for his twisted limbs whenever it was necessary. This was why he had some good spells, when he felt almost like a well man who can sign a document or lean out a window or stop in the middle of a walk to ask a question, bow, look at the west, go on walking. . . . This was why he was able at last, twice, painfully, perilously, to have relations with the empress; and though he considered it a miracle, or to be precise two miracles, because he didn’t think that he’d fully and totally played his part on either of those two sad nights, this was why the empress bore two sons, Eggrizen and Fenabber. The elder, Eggrizen, is our present emperor, Idraüsse V.

“Yes,” the empress said, “that was one of the reasons, of course it was. I didn’t pick you just because you were a good storyteller, though that was part of it. But there were other good storytellers, cleverer, wiser, more famous, and I could have chosen any one of them, except that the reason they were cleverer and wiser was that they were older, sometimes a lot older. Maybe you’ll be like them one day, and even greater than they. I believe you will. I had to be able to believe it, because my sons, who are going to sit on the throne of Empire, have to be not just strong and healthy and handsome, they have to have that vein of madness and passion that lets a man or a woman see the other world which is the shadow of this one, and of which this world is the shadow. And now, good-bye till tomorrow.”

Yes, said the storyteller, the emperor died not long after, when Prince Eggrizen was playing in the palace gardens and his teachers were getting ready to teach him to read, to ride, to command, and when Prince Fenabber was beginning to walk and babble. There’d be no more princes of the Elkerides, to be sure, but the succession was assured, a great relief to many who had feared new struggles for power. And they could rest easy, as it was clear that the Great Empress was strong enough to put down any attempt to prevent her sons from inheriting the throne. And the people loved her: neither she nor her boys needed watchmen or guards, for only a madman or an idiot, seeing her in danger, would have gone on sitting on the doorstep in the sun and not rushed to defend her with their life. She arranged the strangest burial ever heard of for the dead emperor. It was as splendid as most imperial funerals, but an edict prohibited gifts and requested music and flowers. And whoever wished, man, woman, or child, noble or commoner, soldier or beggar, could enter the palace mortuary, at any time, without precedencies or protocols, and say farewell to their emperor. The most skillful embalmers had hurried from Irbandil and worked so swiftly, using all their craft and knowledge, that the emperor lay now, serene and beautiful, his troubled blood at peace at last, a smile on his pale lips, among brocaded silks and down cushions, and his subjects came by him and some paused and raised a hand to touch his forehead or cheek or the fringe of his garments. And they all felt, faintly or deeply according to their capacity to feel, the sadness of ending, of knowing this was the end, that never again would Idraüsse sit on the golden seat of the Lords of the Empire, or open his eyes to the morning, or even feel pain, that he’d never talk to his children, never put on the soft slippers that didn’t hurt his feet, that his rings and his dreams and his clothes and his thoughts and his pain were useless, empty, and that even if someone else used them they wouldn’t be the same. For thirty days the viewing went on, then he was buried. During those thirty days I didn’t go to the palace and didn’t see the empress or her sons. Afterwards I kept on going there to tell her the history of the emperors. And while I told my tales, secretly in the palace and openly in tents that kept getting bigger and fancier, the Empire prospered, grew rich and peaceful. Now and then there was a commotion, naturally; people got restless. But then they found there was no reason for it, and with the passage of years the subjects of the Empire learned to replace restlessness by an expectancy that easily became enthusiasm, whether they understood the cause of it or not. For example: a year after Idraüsse’s death the empress named as Finance Minister a Southerner, a self-taught man with no pompous titles from the Imperial Academies, and she awarded the Imperial Prize of Art to a Southern painter, a scruffy, mannerless fellow who, in a miserable cane shack beside the marshes, had painted cruel, masterful works satirizing the government and blaming it for the poverty and backwardness of his land. The Empire feared the worst. But Clabb-lar-Klabbe was the best finance minister the Empire had had for millennia, and you know I’m not exaggerating, you know there was and still is and will be for years to come enough money for universities and hospitals, for aid to the sick and the poor and the handicapped, for helping those who can’t help themselves, for restorations and conservation and embellishment, for better roads and ports, for building museums and schools, for making sure everybody has light, heat, and food. And you know that she didn’t confront the South with weapons, or decrees, or disdain, as so many emperors had done, but tried to understand, and did. Maybe she discovered new thoughts, I don’t know. She understood that the transformation of the South would come, if ever, from its own marshes, its intransigent tribes, its forest towns and lake cities, not from the throne. She understood that such a transformation might not be pleasant or convenient, and that the best she could do was to keep the South at peace, without violence. Hence, she put up no resistance: she recognized the existence of the South, removed all military garrisons from the borders, had the fences and barriers and barbed wire cleared away, encouraged and even flattered the rebels, gave in on a lot of little points of which she exaggerated the importance and held firm on a few big issues which she played down. And the Southern rebels began doing business with the northern lands, visited the cities, toured the palace, smiled, and fell asleep.

When the Great Empress prohibited all private transportation by wheeled vehicles, many people said she was crazy. Even I, who knew her well by then, looked at her in astonishment and asked her what could be the use of so absurd a measure.

“They increase delinquency,” she answered. “They’ve increased divorces and confinements for mental instability.”

“I confess I don’t understand you, ma’am,” I said. “What have wheeled vehicles got to do with all that? What you ought to do, surely, is institute measures against delinquency, divorces, and insanity.”

“And increase the size of the police force and extend their powers?” said she. “Make it even harder for people to get a divorce? Encourage doctors to study and treat the mad? How stupid. You wouldn’t be a good ruler, my dear friend, though I hope my sons will be. All we’d get by that would be more policemen full of pride and brutality, more lawyers full of red tape, more doctors full of fatuity, and hence more criminal assaults, more divorces, and more nut cases.”

“And by prohibiting private transportation—?” I inquired.

“We’ll see,” she told me.

She was right, of course. Cars and private planes disappeared. Only those who absolutely had to travel more than twenty kilometers were allowed to use public transportation on wheels. Most people walked, or rode donkeys, or, if they were wealthy, had themselves carried in litters. Life slowed down. People didn’t get anxious, because it wasn’t any use. The big centers of buying and selling and banking and industry disappeared, where everybody used to crowd in and push each other and get cross and curse each other out, and small shops opened, little places in every neighborhood where every merchant and banker and businessman knew his customers and their families. The big hospitals that used to serve a whole city or even several cities all disappeared, since an injured person or a woman in childbirth couldn’t travel a long way quickly any more, and little health centers opened that people could walk to and where every doctor knew her patients and had time to chat with them about how the weather was, how the river was rising, how the kids were growing, and even how they felt. The big schools disappeared, where the students were only a number on a form; now the teachers knew why their students were the way they were, and the kids got up without a big rush, walked hand in hand a few blocks without anybody having to escort them, and got to class in plenty of time. People stopped taking tranquilizers, husbands didn’t yell at their wives or wives at their husbands, and nobody knocked the kids around. And bad feelings cooled down, and instead of getting a weapon in order to take money off somebody else, people used their time for something other than hatred and meanwhile began to work to change things, now that there were no rapid vehicles and distances had grown longer. Even the cities changed. The huge cities where a person felt solitary and abandoned came apart, every neighborhood separating itself off into little centers, each one almost a city, self-sufficient, with its schools and hospitals and museums and markets and no more than two or three bored, sleepy policemen sitting in the sun and sipping a lemonade with an old neighbor retired from business. The little cities didn’t grow and didn’t feel any need to increase their area and population, but along the long road that separated one from the next new towns grew up, just as small, just as quiet, full of gardens and orchards and the low houses of people who knew each other and teachers and doctors and storytellers and good-natured policemen. The roads got narrower and better and along them rolled the only busses that were permitted, which were free, but which you couldn’t use unless you were going to visit your old aunt who lived more than twenty kilos away, or were transporting foodstuff from one city to another, or going to a party given by a distant friend. I won’t say there were no more crimes, failed marriages, or insanity. There were, there still are, but few, so few that each one has plenty of people paying attention to it, worrying about it, trying to help, so that criminal tendencies, divorce, and insanity are a misfortune nowadays only for the individuals who suffer from them. And the Great Empress smiled in satisfaction and I admitted to her she’d been right and told her the history of Sderemir the Borenid.

“Yes,” she said, “I know a lot of people say the world is complicated. The ones who say so are the ones who are kept anxious all the time by their work or their family, by a move or an illness, a storm, anything unexpected, anything at all; and then they make bad choices and when things turn out badly they blame it on the world for being complicated and not on their own low and imperfect standards. Why don’t they go further? Why say ‘the world is so complicated’ and stop there? I say the world is complicated, but not incomprehensible. Only, you have to look at it steadily. Isn’t it true a person’s shoulder hurts sometimes because they’ve got a disorder in their stomach? And then what does a stupid doctor do? Orders massage of the shoulder. What does a wise doctor do? He takes time to think about it, watches the patient carefully, gives him some medicine for his stomach, and the pain in his shoulder goes away. Better yet, he explains to his patients what they have to do to keep their stomach from getting out of order. One day his patient’s going to get old and die, just like himself, just like us, and one day, incredible as it may seem, the Empire’s going to die, and how foolish people are who whine about it, and whine about how complicated the world is. A seamstress’s room is complicated too, but even at night, with the lights out, she can reach out in the darkness and find the yellow thread, the needles, the pincushion. We couldn’t, because we don’t know the order things are in, in the seamstress’s room. And we can’t see the order the world is in. But all the same it’s there, right under our eyes.”

Yes, said the storyteller, the Empire will die, like her, but it will die remembering her. Idraüsse V is a good emperor, as good as other emperors the Empire loved and respected. There will be others, I don’t say there won’t be, and young storytellers will recount their deeds and words. And there will be wise, kind empresses, who will stand on the palace balcony and make people weep for love of them. But there couldn’t be a second empress capable of pacifying and enriching the greatest Empire mankind has ever known, capable of despising power, of walking the streets unprotected, of secretly summoning a young storyteller to her rooms so he can teach her what she doesn’t know, of founding a sound, strong, wise dynasty.