Kalpa Imperial

by LAngelica Gorodischer, Ursula K. Le Guin

  “I don’t want that,” said Loo’Loö.

  “You don’t, eh? Why did we come, then? Why are we here?”

  “For other reasons.”

  “Ha!” Renka said again. “They’re terrific, your reasons, it’s a real treat the way you can string reasons together, pal.”

  “There are some things it’s better not to meddle with,” Loo’Loö said quietly. “I thought we agreed about that.”

  “We did,” said Renka. “A long time ago. So long ago I don’t remember. But now we know him, and we’ve raised him to the rank of Ferret, right? He’ll be emperor some day, right?”

  “Yes,” said Loo’Loö, smiling, and his smile filled the world of the ferret prince the way Renka’s laughs and bellows filled it, but with light, not thunder.

  “So,” the big man said, “he needs information, he needs to know something more than music and politics and which foot to put first when he enters the council hall and which color of pen to write with on the third day of the week. I’m going to tell you something, pal: he needs to know everything, he needs to hear and see and touch and smell and taste and suffer everything so he can find out some day what kind of emperor he’s going to be—right? At whatever cost.”

  “I agree,” said Loo’Loö. “But I don’t want that.”

  “You’re lying!” Renka roared. “You’re lying, there’s nothing you want more!”

  Again the ferret prince thought the tiger and the elephant were on the point of destroying each other. But again Loo’Loö smiled.

  “I don’t want it,” he said. “He’s very young and shouldn’t be troubled. He should be let alone, like the beetles. And the ferrets.”

  “He’s no beetle, he’s only a boy. But a prince, worse luck for him,” said Renka. “Beetles know a lot more than he does. Not to mention ferrets.”

  And that, strangely enough, seemed to settle the question. Loo’Loö turned the fierce, steady stare of his dark eyes away from Renka and sat down on the ground and listened. And Renka told all, as he had said he would. And now I’ll tell it to you people, who will never be emperors. I’m not telling it in the hope that you’ll understand me, or understand the ferret prince, but only because the wise say that words, being daughters of the flesh, spoil if they’re kept locked up.

  “Your father was a good man, little ferret,” Renka began, “I can tell you that, since I was his friend for many years, and his only friend for many more years.”

  Yes, Livna’lams said to himself, yes, that’s how it must have been, that’s how it was. And he listened. Renka told him about a handsome man, black-eyed, black-haired, a tranquil, moderate, just man, an emperor who protected his people and composed songs and built cities and enriched farmlands. A man who won the love of everyone who knew him, except his wife, who loved another man.

  “An idiot,” said Renka. “Which doesn’t reflect much credit on your mother. An idiot, shameless, vicious, boastful, cowardly, greedy, and ambitious, which reflects even less credit on her. I’m sorry, but it’s better that I tell you, so you don’t find it out little by little, and keep telling yourself no, no, no, and filling yourself up with so much pain that finally the only way out is to say yes, yes, yes.”

  “Let’s stop there,” said Loo’Loö. “You can go on about his father, since the only way to stop you would be to cut out your tongue, and I don’t know that I want to. I don’t think I do. But don’t talk about his mother.”

  Renka laughed his usual laugh, just as when he told about his adventures or made fun of himself because he’d lost at sintu. “I always said you were crazy, partner,” he said.

  But believe me, the conversation didn’t end there. Renka said nothing more about the Empress Hallovâh, but he told the ferret prince how, when war came, when the enemy approached the borders of the Empire, his father the emperor called the generals together and the army marched away. Flowers rained down, said Renka, armfuls of flowers, on the soldiers, and the emperor, who wasn’t an ambitious coward like the other man, who was hiding in the palace pretending to be sick, and was sick, with fear—the emperor marched at the head of his troops. They fought on the border, Renka said, and they were all brave, but the bravest was the Ninth Emperor of the House of the Hehvrontes. But the other man had stayed behind in the palace, very pale, very blond, very scared, being looked after by his sister the Empress Hallovâh. And both of them expected and hoped that the emperor would die in battle.

  “Not that it would have done them any good,” said Renka, “since although she didn’t know it, she already had you in her belly, little ferret.”

  And he went on with the story: Not only did the emperor stay alive, he defeated the enemy. Then, when news came that the invaders were retreating, when victory was certain, the two in the palace had to find another way: treason, since death had failed them.

  “But the traitor wasn’t your father,” Renka said. “It wasn’t him!”

  And he told how somebody had made sure that the ministers found supposed proof of the emperor’s treason.

  “I said it was somebody,” he insisted. “I didn’t say it was her.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Loo’Loö. And, to the prince, “It really doesn’t matter who it was, prince. What matters, since Renka wants it so, and maybe I do too, is that you know that he didn’t betray you. Even though he didn’t know either that you were going to be born.”

  “The proof,” said Renka without looking at either of them, “was a letter, a secret copy of the secret letters kept in a very well-hidden drawer which now, inexplicably, wasn’t well hidden. In this letter the emperor offered unconditional surrender and permanent submission to the enemy in exchange for gold, enough gold to fill his chests, enough to buy luxury, folly, vice.”

  The ferret prince sat up and looked, not at Renka, but at Loo’Loö. “Didn’t he come back to say it wasn’t true?”

  It was Renka who answered: “A good question. Yes, little ferret, sure, he came back. But he came back in hiding, as if he really had been a traitor, because it’s a very short step from the ministers to the generals, from the generals to the troops, and from the troops to the people. Good sense is inversely proportional to the number of brains, so say the wise. If you don’t understand that, it means that the more people there are to think a thought, the uglier and more crippled and deformed the poor thought gets. So, if the ministers believed it, why not the generals and the troops and the people, eh? And why not, if the emperor’s personal seal was on the letter, eh? Of course somebody had access to his seal, who knows who, pal. Who knows . . .”

  The three were silent for a long time, listening to the rumbling of the black, indecisive storm on the other side of the river.

  “And then?” Livna’lams whispered.

  “I don’t know anything more,” said the giant.

  “It’s true,” said Loo’Loö. “It’s true, we don’t know anything more. Nobody does.”

  “He died?” asked the little ferret.

  “Maybe so, maybe not,” said Renka. “Nobody knows. People say different things.”

  “What things?”

  “They say somebody surprised him trying to enter the palace and killed him, nobody knows who, just somebody. They say nobody killed him. They say somebody else, I don’t say who, some friend of his, warned him in time and so he got away. They say he killed himself. They say he didn’t kill himself and went wandering over the fields, into the mountains. A lot of people say they’ve seen him disguised as a shepherd or a beggar or a monk, and in more than one city they’ve stoned and killed some poor fool who never dreamed of being emperor and had nothing to do with the Hehvrontes. They say that when your mother learned she was pregnant with you she wept and screamed and beat her belly to try to force you out. But you were very small and very well protected and all she could do was put on white clothes and go barefoot with her hair down and no jewelry. They say that the other man beat her when he found out, because she’d promised him to have nothing to do with
her husband and to keep herself for him, and because your birth meant that it wouldn’t be their blood, pure Ja’lahdahlva blood, but your father’s Hehvrontes blood that would rule the Empire. There was, evidently, one solution.”

  “You’re just guessing,” Loo’Loö said.

  Renka burst with a “Ha!” and the storm echoed him. “The solution was to wait it out, then say you’d been born dead and show your poor little corpse around for public mourning. What saved you, Prince Ferret, was a prostitute. The other man caught a deadly fever from her. For over two years he lay in bed, really sick this time, burning up. And in that condition no man could engender sons, as everybody knows. Doctors and treatments and drugs that made him howl and writhe did no good. He died.”

  The storm shouted something very loudly in the distance but the ferret prince didn’t know the language of storms the way gardeners do, and didn’t understand it. Maybe he didn’t hear it. Imagine, if you can: his world had changed utterly.

  The wise say everything has its season, and each stage in a man’s life has its sign, and it must be so, since the wise know what they’re talking about and if sometimes we don’t understand them it’s not their fault but ours. What I say, and this is something I thought myself and never read or heard, is that in the ferret prince’s life the years of sorrow had ended and the years of anger had begun. The worst thing about sorrow is that it’s blind, and the worst thing about anger is that it sees too much. But the prince’s anger wasn’t the kind that flares up and dies down in a few minutes, not like the stupid raging of a drunk or the fury of a jealous husband. It was growing unseen, unknown, hidden, in him, as he had grown in the Empress Hallovâh’s womb. Now and then it made a little movement that showed it was there, as when Renka spoke for the first time of the nameless emperor. But then it would quiet down till it seemed not to exist. And since the anger wasn’t fully formed yet and the sorrow was gone, all that was left was indifference, which is a heavy burden for a child of seven.

  So it was that the little ferret went back to the palace that morning and performed all the acts expected of him and said everything that he was supposed to say and knew he was going to say. So it was that he went on playing his role in the life of the palace and in the ceremony of contempt, too, day after day, beside his mother in her white dress. So it was that he went on studying and taking part in official duties, escaping late in the morning to meet Renka and Loo’Loö and play and laugh and explore the ruined garden with them and sometimes ask them about his father. They always answered his questions, especially big Renka.

  And all this time the anger never ceased; he felt it burning inside him, and his mother guessed it. The empress didn’t know exactly what was going on, but every day she felt more uncomfortable with her son, and when she didn’t see him, when he wasn’t there, still she seemed to hear and see him through the walls and rooms of the palace. Occasionally he looked directly into her eyes, and that was the worst of all. Or he turned his head away so as not to look at her, and that was worse than the worst of all. She increased what she called her expiation, spending the nights on the bare marble floor of her rooms instead of in bed. When that did no good, she ordered the richest food for her table, but lived on bread and water for forty days. That did no good either. She kept on coughing and shaking with fever, shivering in her white clothes. The forty days of fasting and penitence were just ending when one morning in the ceremony of contempt the ferret prince looked up at his mother and, instead of spitting on her medallion, spat in her face.

  Perhaps the lords and ladies and magistrates didn’t notice, perhaps they did. Nobody said anything, nobody looked surprised, nobody moved, including the Empress Hallovâh. She decided, however, to kill her son. And so, on the pretext of her illness, she had a doctor come to her room, and asked him for a drug that would cure insomnia and help her sleep soundly at night, and the silly fool gave it to her with a lot of advice about the dosage. The empress kept the drug in a sealed glass flask and waited for the moment to use it.

  She didn’t use it, obviously, since you’ve all heard of Emperor Ferret, his life, his works, his madness, and his magnificent death. Fooling herself, telling herself she had to know when it would be safe to give Livna’lams the poison, she had him watched by one of her servants. And so she was informed of the existence of Renka and Loo’Loö.

  If you’ve ever lived with somebody in trouble, or if you’ve ever been in bad trouble for a long time, you know the relief unhappy people feel when they find something or somebody to blame their trouble on. That’s exactly what the empress felt. They say she even smiled. I’m not certain I believe it, but I know they say she smiled. And I know she sent for the captain of her bodyguards and ordered him to wait for her in her chambers with ten armed men and the executioner. Then she went barefoot, dressed in white, splendid, her eyes bright and her hair loose and her cheeks burning red, to perform the ritual farce at the broken statue among the trees.

  Late that morning, the ferret prince and the two adventurers were playing a game of skill in which the one who was quickest and most skillful at making a fifteen-foot rope ladder would win the right to make three wishes, which the other two had to grant. Renka and Loo’Loö had brought the ropes all carefully measured and cut, and the big man handed them round, making sure that all three had the same number of pieces in the same condition. And it looked as if Loo’Loö was going to win.

  “Captain, these two trespassers are to be taken and executed at once,” said the empress appearing between the leafless bushes, her feet bruised by loose stones, her face very white, her hands very shaky, her cheeks very red.

  Renka looked up and smiled. Loo’Loö stood up. Anger filled the young prince, forever.

  The captain took a step forward. The weapons were raised and aimed. The empress cried out aloud.

  It was a desolate, furious cry that had struggled to get loose for years, a cry far deeper and stronger than she was, a noise too big to come from that weak throat, those lips cracked with fever.

  “Wait!” she said, defeated, when she could speak.

  Nobody moved, nobody spoke, and a long while, a very long while passed in that unmoving silence.

  “Who are you?” said the pale empress.

  “Two humble workmen in the service of Your Majesty’s palace,” said the enormous brown man. “I’m called Renka and my pal’s called Loo’Loö, a very unusual name. So unusual that I’ve often thought it isn’t really his name. But I’ve never been able to find out, because he knows how to keep a secret.”

  And then Renka smiled still more broadly, pleased with his speech, perfectly happy and cheerful, as if he weren’t in danger, as if there weren’t ten men pointing their weapons at him and Loo.

  The captain of the guard, on the other hand, was disconcerted; he didn’t yet know why he was there and whether he ought to kill these two fellows, or go silently away, or await further orders from his lady. A captain of the guard is invariably a brainless brute, but some, not always the least brutish, acquire a certain training, which in the best cases may lead to subtlety, making them act as appropriately as if they were capable of thought or reason. This captain knew, knew in his guts, that he was out of place in whatever was going on here. And so he signaled his men to lower their arms and step back, and he himself stepped back a few paces, and they waited behind the empress in case she needed them.

  “You must die,” she said, but she didn’t sound as if she believed it.

  “We all have to die, my lady,” Renka said, still smiling. “In our case it’s a pity, because there’s a lot of foreign countries we haven’t seen yet, a lot of rivers to cross, a lot of wine we haven’t tasted, a lot of sweet women to cheer us up and for us to cheer up, nights. In your case, who knows?”

  That was an insult, in case you didn’t notice, and yet the captain didn’t stir from where he stood. It was the ferret prince who spoke: “I pray you, Mother, take care,” he said. “It is not my wish that these men die.”

&n
bsp; That wasn’t an insult, it was an order. Remember what I told you at the start, remember that Livna’lams was heir to the throne, and when he was a little older or when his mother died, he’d be emperor. The empress kept her gaze fixed on one of the two men; she didn’t look at her son, and paid no heed to the captain and his men or the executioner.

  “But, thanks to the generosity of the prince,” she went on as if nothing had been said, “your lives will be spared, on the condition that you leave the palace and the capital at once and never set foot again in the eastern provinces.”

  Renka got up; he made a heap of the unfinished rope ladder and shook the bits of hemp off his hands. “What do you think of the deal?” he asked.

  “The lady is generous,” said Loo’Loö.

  “Oh really?” the big man sneered. “She’s so generous, maybe you should ask her for another favor.”

  “It’s all right, Renka. Let’s go,” said Loo’Loö, still looking at the empress.

  “No,” said Prince Ferret. “I don’t want you to go. Renka, Loo, stay here.”

  “I hate to let a ferret down, but this time there’s no help for it. We’re going, young ’un.”

  “It is an order,” said Livna’lams.

  “Aha, ha, ahaha!” Renka boomed. “I don’t like saying this any better, but there it is: Nobody gives us orders.”

  Loo’Loö turned to Prince Ferret. “Renka’s always joking, Prince,” he said. “But we can’t stay here. Not now. It wouldn’t be a good thing.”

  The future Tenth Emperor of the Hehvrontes dynasty understood. “Where will you go?” he asked.

  “Oh, my little ferret,” said Renka, “who knows, since we don’t know? All the provinces aren’t in the east, you’ll find that out when you’re emperor. In the western provinces there are mountains, in the north there’s snow, in the south are marshes where barbarians live who’ll kill you at a word and give their life for a friend. So long, prince, be a good emperor, and don’t ever forget the things you’ve seen and heard.”