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 a
s 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?
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:
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