Kalpa Imperial (4 page)

The End of a Dynasty, Or The Natural History of Ferrets

The storyteller said: He was a sorrowful prince, young Livna’lams, seven years old and full of sorrow. It wasn’t just that he had sad moments, the way any kid does, prince or commoner, or that in the middle of a phrase or something going on his mind would wander, or that he’d waake up with a heaviness in his chest or burst into tears for no apparent reason. All that happens to everybody, whatever their age or condition of life. No, now listen to what I’m telling you, and don’t get distracted and then say I didn’t explain it well enough. If anybody here isn’t interested in what I’m saying, they can leave. Go. Just try not to bother the others. This tent’s open to the south and north, and the roads are broad and lead to green lands and black lands and there’s plenty to do in the world—sift flour, hammer iron, beat rugs, plow furrows, gossip about the neighbors, cast fishing nets—but what there is to do here is listen. You can shut your eyes and cross your hands on your belly if you like, but shut your mouth and open your ears to what I’m telling you: This young prince was sad all the time, sad the way people are when they’re old and alone and death won’t come to them. His days were all dreary, grey, and empty, however full they were.

And they were full, for these were the years of the Hehvrontes dynasty, those proud, rigid rulers, tall and handsome, with white skin and very black eyes and hair, who walked without swinging their shoulders or hips, head high, gaze fixed somewhere beyond the horizon, not looking aside even to see their own mother in her death-agony, not looking down even if the path was rough and rocky, falling into a well if it was in the way and standing erect down inside the well, maintaining the dignity of the lords of the world. That’s what they were like, I’m telling you, I who’ve read the old histories till my poor eyes are nearly blind. That’s what they were like.

Livna’lams’s grandfather was the eighth emperor of the Hehvrontes dynasty; and his father—well, we’ll be talking about his father presently. That is,
I’ll
be talking, because you ignorant boors know nothing of the secret history of the Empire, occupied as you are in the despicable business of accumulating money, decorating your houses out of vanity, not love of beauty, eating and drinking and wallowing your way to apoplexy and death. I’ll talk about him when the time comes. For now, suffice it to say that the pride of the Hehvrontes had elaborated a stupid, showy, formal protocol unequalled at any other period of the Empire except that of the Noörams, who were equally stupid but less showy and more sinister. Luckily for people like you, the Noörams killed each other off, and nobody believes the story that a servant saved from the bloodbath a newborn son of the Empress Tennitraä, called The She-Snake and The Unjust, though nobody can disprove the story either. . . .

The Protocol of the Hehvrontes involved everything. It filled the court and the palace and filtered down into public charities, the army, schools, hospitals, whore-houses—high class whore-houses, you understand, since anything that fell short of a considerable fortune or a sonorous title lacked importance and so escaped the protocol. But in the palace, oh, in the palace! There the black-eyed, black-bearded lords had woven a real nightmare in which a sneeze was a crime and the tilt of a hatbrim a disgrace and the thoughtless twitch of a finger a tragedy.

Livna’lams escaped none of it. How could he, the crown prince, the tenth and, I’ll tell you now, the last of the Hehvrontes, only son of the widowed empress, on whom were fixed the eyes of the court, the palace, the capital, the Empire, the world! That’s why he was sorrowful, you say? Come, come, my good people, ignorance has one chance at good sense: keeping its mouth shut. Or so say the wise. But I say that if you’re utterly, hopelessly ignorant, there isn’t room in your skull for even that much sense. Come on, now, why would the Protocol make him sad? Why, when nine Hehvrontes before him had been perfectly happy, well maybe not nine but definitely eight—had been so happy that, attributing their beatific state to that very protocol, they devoted themselves to augmenting and enriching the hundred thousand minute formalities that distinguished them from everybody else? No, he too might well have been happy and satisfied, being a prince, made like any other prince for the frivolous and terrible uses of power. But he wasn’t. Maybe because the men in his family line had changed, since his grandfather took as his empress a Southern woman reputed to be not entirely human. Or maybe because of the ceremony which his mother, the Empress Hallovâh, had added to the Protocol of the Palace. Or because of both those things.

So, now, let me tell you that the Empress Hallovâh was very beautiful, but I mean
very
beautiful, and still young. The young heart is wide open to life and love, say the wise, and then they smile and look into the eyes of the child eager to learn, and add: and also open to sickness and hatred. The empress always dressed in white, long white tunics of silk or gauze with no ornament, nothing but a fine, heavy chain of unpolished iron links round her neck, from which a plain locket hung on her breast. She was always barefoot, her hair loose. In expiation, she said. Her hair was the color of ripe wheat. Remember that she was a Hehvrontes by marriage only. By birth she was from the Ja’lahdahlva family, who had been moving upward rapidly for the last three generations. She had grey eyes, a fine mouth, a slim waist. She never smiled.

Precisely one hour after sunrise, seven servants, each dressed in one of the colors of the rainbow, entered Prince Livna’lams’s room and woke him by repeating meaningless words about fortune, happiness, obligation, benevolence, in fixed phrases hundreds of years old. If I were to try to explain these words to you and tell how each man dressed in a different color each day so that the one who came in wearing blue today tomorrow would wear purple and yesterday wore red, if I tried to describe their gestures, the other words they said and the clothing they dressed the boy in and the tub they bathed him in and the perfumes assigned to each day, we’d have to stay here till the Short Harvest Feast, spending what’s left of summer and the whole autumn and sitting through snow and frost to see false spring and then the ground white again and the sky all thick with clouds until the day when the shoots must be gathered before the sun burns them or the hail destroys them, and even then we’d have trouble getting through the ceremony of the Bath and the Combing of the Hair, and not just because of the torpid sluggishness of the tiny intellects inside your skulls.

The prince opened his eyes, black Hehvronte eyes, and knew he had twenty seconds to sit up in bed and another twenty to get out of bed. The servants bowed, asserted their fidelity and respect in the formula proper for that day of the year, undressed him, and surrounding him closely escorted him to the bath, where other servants of inferior rank had prepared the tub full of scented water and the towels and sandals and oils and perfumes. After the bath they dressed him, never in clothes that he had worn before, and again surrounding him in a certain order, they escorted him to the door of the apartment, where another servant unlocked the lock and another opened both leaves of the door so that the boy might cross the threshold into the anteroom. There the lords of the nobility, clothed in the colors of the imperial house, received him with more bows and more formulas of adulation, and informed him of the state of the weather and the health of the Empress Hallovâh, which was always splendid, and recited to him the list of activities he was to perform today in the palace, and asked him what he wished to have for breakfast. The prince always gave the same answer:

“Nothing.”

This, too, was by way of expiation, said the empress, except that it was a farce like all the rest, since nobody expected the child to die of hunger. Yet it wasn’t a farce, because Livna’lams was never hungry. The nobles pleaded with him to eat so that he’d grow strong, brave, just, handsome, and good, as an emperor should be. The little boy assented, and they all went on to a dining room where a table was spread and eleven servants looked after the plates, the silver, the goblets, the platters, the napkins, the decorations, the water the crown prince drank and what little food he ate, while the noblemen looked on and approved, standing behind the chair of ancient, fragrant wood covered with cushions and tapestries. Every dish, every mouthful, every sip, every movement was meticulously planned and controlled by the Protocol of the Palace. And when all that was done, another servant opened the door of the room, and other noblemen escorted the emperor-to-be, and now came the moment, the only moment in the day, when the son and the mother met.

Even misfortune has its advantages, say the wise. Of course the wise say stupid things, because even wisdom has its foolishness, say I. But there’s no question but that being down has its up side. If Livna’lams hadn’t been such a sorrowful prince, in that moment he might have been frightened, or angry, or in despair. But sorrow filled him till he couldn’t feel anything. Nothing mattered to him, not even the Empress Hallovâh, his mother.

She would be sitting dressed in white on a great chair upholstered in white velvet, surrounded by her seventy-seven maids of honor, who wore bright colors and were loaded with gold and jewels, crowned with diadems, shod with embroidered satin slippers, their hands and wrists beringed and braceleted. As the prince came, in all the ladies bowed deeply and the empress stood up, for though she was his mother, he was going to be the emperor. She greeted him: “May the day be propitious for you, Prince.”

He replied, “May the day be propitious for you, Mother.”

Even you ignorant louts who don’t know beans about anything let alone palaces and courts can see how differently they behaved towards each other. But then, while all the ladies in waiting stayed bowed down to the ground in submission, the Empress Hallovâh acted as if she felt tenderness towards the child: kissed him, stroked his face, asked him how he’d slept, if he’d had good dreams, if he loved her, if he’d like to go walking in the gardens with her. The prince would take one of the woman’s hands in his and reply: “I slept very well and my dreams were happy and serene, Mother. I love you very much, Mother. Nothing would please me more than to walk in the gardens, Mother.”

When this section of the Protocol was complete, the prince and the empress walked side by side holding hands to the great glass doors that opened on the gardens. As they reached them, the woman would stop and look at her son: “Though we are happy,” she would say, “we cannot enjoy our good fortune until we have completed our duties, painful as they may be.”

“I was about to suggest to you, Mother,” the prince would reply, “that as leaders and protectors of our beloved people, we owe our happiness to them, and our principal task is to see that justice is done to the living and the dead.”

“The dead can wait, Prince.”

At this point in the dialogue the ladies, still all doubled over curtsying, felt some relief at the thought that soon they’d be able to straighten up their backs and necks.

“That is so, Mother; but not the people, who await our judgment on which of the dead were great men and which were traitors.”

The ladies straightened up. The prince and the empress were already in the gardens. Sun or snow or rain or wind or hail, lightning, thunder, whatever the weather, the two of them, the little boy and the woman in white, walked every morning to the central fountain, where eight marble swans opened their wings to the water falling from a basin of alabaster. South of the fountain, paths ran through a grove, and following one of them deep into the shadows—green in the sunlight, dark in storm—they came to what once had been a statue. Had been, I say. There wasn’t much of it left. The pedestal was intact, but the pink-grained marble had been scratched all over with a chisel to erase the inscription, the names and dates. Above that nothing remained but a shapeless lump of white marble, whether pink-grained or not you couldn’t tell, it was so battered and filthy. It might have been the figure of a man; looking carefully you could make out the stump of an arm, a ruined leg, a truncated, headless neck, something like a torso. In front of it the prince and the empress stood and waited. The noblemen arrived, then the ladies, then the officers of the palace guard and the soldiers, magistrates, lawyers, and functionaries. And behind them came the servants, trying to peer over the heads of the gentry to see what happened.

What happened was, day after day, the same, always exactly the same. Some moments of silence, till everything within the palace walls seemed to have fallen still. And then suddenly, at the same instant, the joined voices of the mother and son: “We curse you!” they said. “May you be cursed, may you be damned, hated, loathed, despised forever! May your memory waken only rancor towards you, your face, your deeds. We curse you!”

Another silence, and the empress spoke: “Treason degrades and corrupts all that it touches,” she said. “I vow to heaven and earth and all the peoples therein to expiate for the rest of my life the guilt of having been your wife, of having shared your throne, your table, and your bed.”

Again everyone was silent. The boy prince took a whip which one of the noblemen offered him, a pearl-handled whip, seventeen strands, tipped with steel hooks. With it he struck at the statue, what was left of it: twenty blows that echoed through the grove. Sometimes a bird got the notion to start singing just at that moment, and this was considered a lamentable occurrence to be discussed in low voices during all the rest of the day throughout the palace, from the throne room to the kitchens. But we know that the birds and beasts, the plants, the waters all have their own protocol, and evidently have no intention of changing it for a human one.