Kalpa Imperial (2 page)

When the other boys went on their first with their father, grandfather, uncle, or big brother, Bib went hunting too. And then for the first time the men and women of the village looked at him and thought maybe Voro’s boy was something more than an idler who spent all day and half the night wandering who knows where and blowing in a hollow reed that had five holes bored in it instead of two like the ones played for the dances when the long days of sunlight began. For Bib, small and weak as he was, brought back more game than any of his companions, even Itur who was almost a warrior already, with a scarred face and shoulders as wide as a ram’s back.

It was the only time in his life that Bib went hunting. Well, he’d proved he was a man and from now on nobody should try to give him orders. He left the dead animals for others to skin and roast or salt for him, and refused to show the weapon with which he’d killed them. That wasn’t important, though the people, particularly the men, would have liked to know what made those peculiar wounds. It was unusual, but not important: every boy on his first hunt was expected to make his own weapons, which gave him a certain right to do whatever he pleased with them afterwards, including hiding them from the others.

But the next day, my friends, to the amazement and maybe the scandal and certainly the dread of all the villagers, Bib left his hut and walked to the ruins and without asking anybody’s leave entered the great doorways and was lost in the shadows, as if swallowed up by Fear. He came back in the evening, carrying a load so heavy that he staggered at every step, went into his fragile, windowless hut, gave his mother a lot of queer, shining things, and told her to use them. She had no idea what they were for.

“This one’s for putting food in, and it won’t ever break,” Bib told her. “See? I hit it and it doesn’t break into bits like earthenware. The best bowls, even the ones Lloba makes, get broken, or they crack and let the soup run out. Not this one. Don’t be scared, nothing will happen if we use these things. This one’s for stirring with; don’t use a hollowed-out stick any more, this is better, and it won’t break or rot, either. . . . You could put this one on the fire for cooking soup or meat, but you’d better keep water in it, because it gets too hot and it might burn you. . . . This one’s for cutting leather: you put a finger here, and one here, and spread out the leather with the other hand, and do it like this. . . . This one’s to reflect the sun—no, not there, you have to hold it here, and that side faces up. Don’t drop it. It does break. Magic? Why? Those are just our faces, yours and mine. All right, we can put it down like this and it won’t reflect anything. . . . This one’s for keeping things in, but it’s better than a bag because you can keep things separate, arrowheads here, fishhooks here, knives here, feathers here, and this big part down below for winter clothes. . . . This is to sit on, or you can stand on it and reach the lower branches of trees. . . . This is for holding meat when you want to cut it, see? And this is for you to put around your neck instead of that string of yellow bones Voro gave you.”

“But they’re from animals he killed hunting, before you were born,” said his mother.

“That doesn’t matter,” Bib said. “They’re ugly, they’re just old dry bones. This is harder, and prettier, and it shines in the light—see?”

And Bib went on explaining to her what each thing he’d brought back was for. Meanwhile, outside, the oldest and bravest and smartest men of the tribe were talking about what the boy had done. Around nightfall, one of them left the group, came to Bib’s hut, and called to him.

“I’m here,” Bib said, appearing in the doorway.

“Bib son of Voro,” said the man, “what you have done is evil.”

“Why don’t you go to bed, old man?” said Bib.

The man was outraged: “You’re going to die, Bib!” he shouted. “We’re going to burn your house and roast you inside it with your mother and all those accursed things!”

“Don’t be stupid,” the boy said, smiling.

The man went on shouting, he opened his arms and hurled himself at Bib, but he never reached him. Bib raised his right hand and in that hand was a little, shiny weapon. Bib fired and the man fell dead.

Nobody else said anything about killing the son of Voro or burning his house full of things taken from the ruins. The villagers went right on believing that Fear dwelt there, but they’d rather face it than Bib’s weapon. That was why they agreed to let him divide them into groups and take them off to excavate the ruins every day, after they’d tended to the animals and the little children and the sick. Gone were the days when they had to get permission to enter the ruined palaces seeking the point of an iron grille to replace a lance-head. Gone too were the times of fear, though they didn’t know it and would have denied it. Though it’s true that they refused to rebuild the apartments and move into them, and that Bib couldn’t convince them that they’d live better and more safely there, it’s also true that under the boy’s direction they hauled loose stones, fallen beams, and rusted grillwork, and used them to build themselves new houses with solid walls and roofs, proper doors and windows and interior partitions.

But Bib didn’t let them touch the biggest of the ruined buildings: “That’s my house,” he said. “Some day I’m going to live there.”

The men and women of his tribe told him not to, the demons of darkness would appear in the night and carry him off. Bib laughed because he knew there were no demons of darkness. They no longer threatened him.

Well, well, where’s all this leading us? You’ll soon see, my good friends, you’ll soon see: it leads to something farther along in time, when all the villagers lived in stone houses and ate off gold plates and served water in crystal jugs, some of them blackened, others cracked or with a broken lip, and in silver vases or cups, on carved tables which had been carefully cleaned and sanded. And they slept in beds which were missing the headboard or a post or a leg, with old cloaks laid over the straps, but real beds, wide and long, that filled the back rooms of the stone houses. The old people never got used to such things and just as they sometimes asked for their old clay bowls to eat from, so they sometimes secretly slept on the floor beside the big beds. But Bib said that powerful, valiant people slept in beds, not on the ground like the animals that serve only to provide work and food for their masters; and the young people and children liked feeling powerful and valiant.

And so when winter came the men had finished building a wall that surrounded the new houses, the animal pens, the granaries and the ruins of Fear. The wall was gated and locked, with a great iron door that had taken them a month to carry and set in place. So when snow and hunger drove other tribes to seek food, attacking, killing, stealing, Bib’s people resisted them. They chased down the surviving assailants and brought some of them into the stone city. Nobody knew it, not even the son of Voro knew it, but the Empire was being reborn.

Winter passed, spring came and passed, summer came; the stone city was changing fast, growing. They had to knock down part of the wall and rebuild it much farther out. Among the ruins were flat stones they used to pave the walkways between houses, and when they ran out of stones from the ruins they went looking for more in other ruins or natural quarries. It became necessary to construct landings on the river, and to cut wood into boards and fit them together into big boats instead of hollowing out logs to make canoes. It became necessary to bring more stones to erect more houses, and to clear the central place so that people could meet there to exchange what they made or harvested. Somebody made a circular platter turned by the pressure of a foot on a lever, put clay on it, and in a few moments shaped a vessel to contain liquids. A woman who had a sick child who couldn’t walk took two of the rollers they used to drag the flat stones over the ground and put a platform on them so the child could be moved. A man with a big family built up the walls of his house and added an upper floor and an inside staircase. The young people sat under the trees with the old people and asked what were the delicate, rare tools they kept finding in the ruins, what were they used for. Sometimes the old folks knew, sometimes they didn’t, and then the young ones found out for themselves by trying, hurting themselves, getting it wrong, and starting over. Protected and sheltered, well fed, safe from enemies and wild animals, the population of the city grew in number and in strength. What’s more, by the rainy season the people who came to them weren’t attacking, but came looking for refuge or for work or to offer what they made and what they knew. And when the rains ended and the fields turned deep green and men and women were harvesting grain and fruit, something very important happened.

The young man they still called Bib really did want to go live in the big stone house in the ruins, because the dreams he’d dreamed as a child and the thoughts he’d thought as he grew to manhood were all still there, still alive within those walls, which in his eyes loomed ever grander. Not much was left of the other ruins of Fear, since everything that had been there, buried or not, was being used for living or for building in the city. Only the great central edifice stood as before; and there Bib worked, paving the ground with flagstones or uncovering the old faded tiling, setting beams in place to support upper floors, repairing, reinforcing walls and lintels, studying and trying to guess the purpose of the pipes of soft metal that stuck out between the joints of the stones.

In that big house, in a room shut off by its fallen ceiling, one day toward the end of summer Bib came upon a gigantic chair, heavy as a mountain. It shone like the dishes he’d brought to his mother on his first day of manhood, and was covered with hard beads like those on the necklace that she’d worn since then instead of the string of teeth from animals Voro had killed in a long-ago winter before he was born. The chair was so high, so imposing, so solid, so tremendous, that it scarcely seemed made for a man. Bib thought it might be for a giant. He also thought he was a giant. Certainly not in body: Bib was still a weak little man, not very tall. Yet he thought himself a giant, and the chair was made for him. He climbed the three steps of its base and seated himself on it. Alone, in the ruined place, in almost total darkness since light entered only through the hole the son of Voro had made in the ceiling that had fallen across the old doorway, there he sat, a bold, inquisitive, disobedient barbarian, on the Golden Throne of the Lords of the Empire.

Well, you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that once he’d sat in the seat of power, Bib became a giant. No, my friends, I don’t mean that he grew taller or fatter. He was just as he had been, smaller and shorter than most men of his age, but he thought intensely of himself not as an isolated person but as part of something that no longer existed and that needed him in order to exist. And that, my friends, that’s the kind of thinking that turns us into giants.

Why go on about this old story? There’s plenty to do in the streets and houses of the city; there’s plenty to do in the cities and fields of the Empire, and some of you may be thinking that this storyteller’s too caught up in the tale he’s telling. Well, well, there’s some truth in that, but be patient; there’s not much more. It remains to be told that autumn came to the city of stone, and gave place to winter. And when the snow fell, the city was named Bibarandaraina, and received tribute from many new cities, weaker, poorer, smaller, more hastily constructed, which it in return defended and protected. In the center of this capital stood the ancient palace, now occupied by Emperor Bibaraïn I, called The Flute-Player, initiator of the Voronnsid dynasty, one of the founders of the Empire. None of you will ever find a portrait of The Flute-Player in the history books or the interminable galleries of images of the many men and women who sat on the Golden Throne, for no painting or sculpture of him remains, if there ever was one. We storytellers who sit in the town squares or in tents to tell old tales, only we can picture what he was like. And if you want something to remember him by, all you have to do is go into the palace of the good Emperor Ekkemantes I, find the room that gives on the hexagonal garden, and gaze at the last vestige of another palace, one that was destroyed, like the Empire, by war, and that, like the Empire, was brought back to life, thousands of years ago, by that man who was too weak, too inquisitive, too disobedient.

He was a good emperor. I won’t say he was perfect, because he wasn’t; no, my friends, no man is perfect and an emperor less than anybody, because he holds power in his hands, and power is as dangerous as an animal not fully tamed, dangerous as acid, sweet and fatal as poisoned honey. But I do say he was a good emperor. He knew, for example, the right side of the coin from the wrong side, and that’s already a great deal to know. Of course he sometimes chose the wrong, for the birth of an Empire is something too big for the thoughts, the feelings, and the acts of a single man. And so it was that the first thing he did was organize an army—wrong—in order to keep down disorder in the semibarbarous cities and towns and to protect those that were already his subjects—right. After that he had the ruins and remains of the old Empire brought to light wherever there was a trace of them, which was all across the whole territory, and returned them to their place and splendor, and thanks to them he could trace out the borders of the provinces. And then he selected the cleverest men and set them to deciphering the sound and meaning of whatever they found written on paper, on cloth, on marble or on metal. Soon after, schools were founded, and as people had relearned to make fire and bury their dead, so they relearned to read, to write, to make laws, to compose music, to design gears, to polish glass, to solder metal, to measure fields, to cure sicknesses, to observe the sky, to lay roads, to count time, and even to live in peace.