Kalpa Imperial (28 page)

“We’ll camp here,” said the old man on the last day, at nightfall.

The people looked at one another wondering, but they obeyed. The Cat went here and there doing this and that and mostly making noise, like a tiltill bird building its nest in the eaves. Nayidemoub came up to Bolbaumis. “Why are we making camp?” he asked.

“Didn’t you hear?” said the fat man. “Z’Ydagg said to make camp.”

“I know, I know, I’m not deaf, that’s not what I’m asking. Why are we making camp when we could go on and be in the city before nightfall?”

“Don’t rush it, Mr. Nayidemoub,” said Mistress Assyi’Duzmaül. “What’s the hurry?”

“The old man knows what he’s doing,” Bolbaumis said.

“What if we went and asked him?” Nayidemoub insisted.

Pfalbuss laughed. “Did you ever do that in a caravan? Ask the twentier why he’s doing what he does?”

“No.”

“Could be that daddy saw the eye,” said The Cat.

“What eye?”

“The eye the world came out of. Like he told.”

“Could be,” said the woman.

The men laughed. Nonne was cooking, and the soldier was tuning the serel.

“I’m not going to sing today,” The Cat said while they were drinking their coffee. “I’ll sing tomorrow early when we come into the city. But can I ask you something, daddy? I want to know if when the world came out of the eye, the twenty directions came out of it too, that you twentiers know about.”

“Yes,” the old man said. “But they came out a lot later, when the eye was already hidden from the sight of mankind, and only mad folk and dying people could see it. And thus people knew nothing of the twenty directions, and thus they were divided into little kingdoms each with its own language, each with its laws and money and ambitions and madnesses, and nobody thought of the Empire, and the Empire didn’t exist. And so it was that one night out of the eye came not a speck of dust but a fine thread, finer even than the hair of a newborn child, and the thread flew through the air, and flew on and on, and flew in through the window of a little hut in which a man was lying down with his eyes open. He was a humble man who worked hard to make a living, and didn’t wear fine clothes, or eat delicate food; a man who didn’t know how to read or write and hadn’t learned chemistry or astronomy, but who thought a lot about his family, the men and women who worked and suffered as he did. And since the man lay with his eyes open trying to understand how the world was ordered, the thread that came flying through the air entered into his right eye and there split into twenty even finer threads, and the man lying in the hut saw the twenty directions, and understood.”

“What are the twenty directions, daddy?” asked The Cat.

The old man couldn’t help smiling at the boy’s shameless boldness.

“Those aren’t matters for a child to know,” he said.

Next day the birds were singing when the caravan set off. The Cat walked along singing.

“We aren’t in the city yet, Cat,” Pfalbuss told him.

“But I feel like singing, Mr. Pfalbuss,” the boy said, and went on singing.

It was a handsome city. Not very big, but handsome. Around it were green fields and woods; it rose up very bright and clear, almost white, against the morning sky.

“We have arrived,” said old Z’Ydagg, looking behind him for Bolbaumis, to hand over the command of the caravan to him.

“Good, good,” said the fat man.

Undoubtedly Bolbaumis meant to say more, to remark on how much he’d spent to get across the desert and how little he was going to make out of it, while he got off his mount and went forward to take the twentier’s place. But he couldn’t go on talking. The ruddy color the sun and wind had given him faded, leaving his face white as wax. He opened his mouth and couldn’t shut it. With a shaking hand he pointed ahead of them.

“What’s that?” Nayidemoub shouted.

The old twentier turned and looked at the city.

“We’re being attacked!” cried the serel-player, seizing his weapons.

The five armed guards ran forward together to defend the others. For as if out of nowhere a group of horsemen came galloping towards the caravan. Old Z’Ydagg cupped his hands to his mouth and gave the warning shout. The loaders stirred up the animals to use them as a shield between the people of the caravan and the attackers. But somebody had shouted at the same time as the twentier, a powerful voice, used to giving orders. Who shouted, who was that? the old man asked himself, while he tried to impose some order on the confusion. Somebody had cut out Pfalbuss’s fine, fast horse, was mounting it, galloping against the attackers. Who was it, who could it be? Whose were those woman’s clothes, fluttering uselessly, while the rider galloped in the lead of Bolbaumis’s guardsmen? But then, the old man told himself while he helped pile up packloads near the animals who were kicking and struggling to get loose, but then, I was wrong, dead wrong. I didn’t understand. And The Cat?

“Where’s the boy?” Z’Ydagg shouted.

Bolbaumis’s men were fighting on the road, and with them was the man who’d disguised himself as an old woman, a silk dealer.

“I’m here, daddy,” said The Cat, “but not for long. I know how to fight too!” And he ran off towards the road.

“Back, Cat, come back! Don’t go!” the old man cried.

And the man who’d traveled with them dressed as a woman and now was fighting like a demon, covered with sweat and blood, echoed him: “Back, Highness! Go back!” he shouted.

“Twenty are the world’s directions,” murmured Z’Ydagg, the old man who knew the desert, “twenty, and the twenty lead to good and to evil, to emptiness and fullness, to movement and to stillness, to white and to black, and I’m nothing but an old man who was just about to lose his way.”

One of Bolbaumis’s men fell dead. Two of the attackers detached themselves from the group and spurred their horses towards the merchants. Fat Bolbaumis whipped out a weapon and prepared to defend his money. Somebody, that man, cut off a head that rolled on the road, bloody, muddy, the eyes still open, and turned to pursue the riders that were coming closer and closer to the caravan. Where was The Cat? The pack animals snorted and tugged at the ropes holding them, and a wagon tipped over, one wheel spinning in air. The old man raised his gun, found firm footing and waited, and without haste, calm, tranquil, shot the man who was coming at him through the heart. Bolbaumis took care of the other one, neatly, with a swiftness surprising in a man of his girth. Here and there, when he could, Z’Ydagg managed to catch sight of a little figure that darted in and out of his field of vision, fired a gun, dodged, hopped back, fired again. The blood-covered demon who had been Mistress Assyi’Duzmaül drew back, sprang forward and rushed with a yell into the fray once more, killing and killing. The old man ran to join him and the guards, and standing beside Bolbaumis aimed and fired and hit, time and again.

“They’re going, they’re going! Reinforcements are coming! Look, look there, we’re saved!” cried the merchants and the loaders.

The man they’d all thought was a woman galloped after the fugitives and would have caught and no doubt killed them if his horse hadn’t stumbled, worn out or wounded. The man leaped up and came running back to the caravan: “Where is she?” he was shouting. “Where is she, you fools?”

“Here,” The Cat said. “Don’t worry, I’m not hurt. I know how to fight too.”

Strange events, strange people were to be seen on the day Princess Nargennendia was crowned Empress. Everything was done according to protocol and tradition, but the regent, sister of the dead Emperor Louwantes IV, did not come out of her apartments in the palace to go to the throne room: she was brought under guard from the dungeons to place the crown on the girl’s head and the scepter in her hands, and then was taken back to the prison in which she would spend the rest of her life, condemned for attempted regicide. And as for the strange people, they were all around the empress, elbowing ministers, dignitaries, and judges: three soldiers, one with a sack unmistakably containing a serel hung from his left shoulder, all of them uncomfortable in new uniforms; various men who were not nobles and looked a lot more like merchants or working men; another who wore on his chest the distinctive blue and gold of the Imperial Cooks; the Captain of the Empress’s Imperial Guard, whose presence in the throne room was proper, but not in such privileged proximity to the newly crowned sovereign; a smiling, self-satisfied, overdressed fat man; and an old fellow in a grey tunic, wearing the soft boots of a traveler or a guide, a lean, calm old man who stood very straight at the right hand of the Empress Nargennendia I, she who passed into history with the strange appellation of The Cat, she who the tellers of tales say was nearly as wise as the Great Empress Abderjhalda but much happier; nearly as valiant as Ysadallma but much more beautiful; nearly as strong as Eynisdia the Red but much more compassionate; she who inaugurated her reign with a question to the old man who stood at the right of the Golden Throne:

“What are the twenty directions of the world, daddy?”

The storytellers say that the old man smiled slightly, like one unaccustomed to smiling in palaces, and replied, “I’ll tell you what they are, my lady, but you must promise me to forget them at once.”

“Yes,” she said. “I promise. Cat’s honor.”

Then, they say, old Z’Ydagg told the twenty directions of the world, and the empress listened, and when he was done she tried to forget them. And they say that she succeeded, but not wholly: there was one, they say, that she could not forget; but nobody, neither the tellers nor their tales, can tell us what it was.

About the Author

Angélica Gorodischer, daughter of the writer Angélica de Arcal, was born in 1929 in Buenos Aires and has lived most of her life in Rosario, Argentina. From her first book of stories, she has displayed a mastery of science-fiction themes, handled with her own personal slant, and exemplary of the South American fantasy tradition. Oral narrative techniques are a strong influence in her work, most notably in
Kalpa Imperial
, which since its publication has been considered a major work of modern fantasy narrative.

Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California. Her parents were the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of
Ishi.
She went to Radcliffe College, and did graduate work at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953; they have lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1958, and have three children and three grandchildren.

Ursula K. Le Guin has written poetry and fiction all her life. Her first publications were poems, and in the 1960s she began to publish short stories and novels. She writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children’s books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voice texts for performance or recording. As of 2003, when her translation of
Kalpa Imperial
was first published, she had published over a hundred short stories (collected in nine volumes), two collections of essays, twelve books for children, five volumes of poetry, two of translation, and nineteen novels. Among the honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, five Hugo Awards, and five Nebula Awards.

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