Kalpa Imperial

by LAngelica Gorodischer, Ursula K. Le Guin

  Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities

  The storyteller said: They gave all kinds of names to it, they made up all kinds of origins for it, and all of them were false. The names were mere inventions of obscure, scheming little men whose sole ambition was to get one step higher on a miserable official ladder or obtain a place among the palace lickspittles or a little extra money to satisfy some petty vanity. And the origins were laborious artifacts constructed to display some influential personage as a descendant of the hero who was supposed to have founded it in a fit of divine madness. Lighthouse of the Desert, it was called, and Jewel of the North; Star, Mother, Guide, Cradle. All those words, which you will have noticed are closely related, were worked up into pompous, hollow descriptions. Thus, the younger brother of Ylleädil the Great, starving and half frozen, pursued by the men who had dethroned the Warrior Emperor, coming to the foot of the mountains unsheathed the imperial sword in order to take his own life, but instead of plunging the blade into his heart he thrust it into the ground and cried, “Here shall arise the new capital of the new Empire!”—That’s one of the stories. Or it’s a helpless maiden who came to that same place, where the Spring of the Five Rivers still rises, and dug with her hands in the rain-wet dirt and made a well and buried herself alive in the mud mixed with her own blood, rather than allow a lascivious emperor to dishonor her. Usually the emperor is not named, though sometimes a name is daringly mentioned, all perfectly plausible, since there was no lack, indeed a steady supply, of lascivious gentlemen on the imperial throne. But this particular emperor, they insist, repented—already we’re losing credibility—and raised a monument to the girl who had slipped through his fat fingers, moreover he provided housing for the people who looked after the monument. Others frown, cough, raise their eyes to Heaven and explain how Ylleranves the Philosopher, also called the Nose, not for the organ that grows in the middle of the faces of commoners and emperors alike but for sticking his in where it didn’t belong—how Ylleranves recognized the place as the location of the Garden of Perfect Beauty told of in mystical books, and sought to build there a perfect city inhabited by a new and perfect generation who would regain the Golden Age of mankind. Of course the Nose didn’t have time to achieve all this since he was still young when his bodyguards cut him into ribbons and gave the imperial throne to Legyi the Short, who was no worse than Ylleranves because it would have been hard to be a worse emperor than the Nose, but who was just about as bad, although he and the Empire both had a bit of good luck when he married an energetic, intelligent, fair-minded woman. Yes, gentlemen, yes: the Empress Ahia Della, who left the Empire sons, grandsons, great-grandsons as just and sensible as herself, to everybody’s great relief.

  All these works of the imaginative inventions unfortunately got into chronicles, which were made into books which everybody respected and believed, principally because they were thick, hard to hold, tedious, and old. And they got into legends, those tales that everybody says they don’t believe in because they can’t take them seriously, and that everybody believes in precisely because they can’t take them seriously. And they were sung in ballads, which are insidious because they pass so easily about town squares and the ports and the dance halls. And none of it was true, none of it, none of the romantic origins, none of the melodious and fantastical names.

  I’m the one who can tell you what really happened, because it’s the storyteller’s job to speak the truth even when the truth lacks the brilliance of invention and has only that other beauty which stupid people call mean and base.

  You see the city? You see it now, as it stands? It starts up from the plain, all of a piece, the backs of the houses turned to what was a desert. It has no great gates, no battlements or towers or encircling walls. Enter one of the holes in it—a street—and climb. Seen from above, the city’s an irregular many-colored square peppered with dark points, bright points at night. The streets and buildings and balconies and facades are all mixed up together, factories stand next to mansions, shops next to embassies. Very few of its inhabitants know all its streets and ways. I won’t go so far as to say it’s a labyrinth. If I had to describe it in a few words, I’d say: A colony of fear-crazed ants, escaping from a ferocious spider, build a hiding place. They climb straight up the mountain, with a desperate rashness not lacking in vainglory. They lay their foundations on stone or sand, it doesn’t matter: the point is to go up, up as far as possible. They succeed, as you might expect. The mountains are buried under walls, balconies, terraces, parks; a square slants down, separated from a steep drop by stone arcades; the third floor of a house is the basement of another that fronts on the street above; the west wall of a government building adjoins the ironwork around the courtyard of a school for deaf girls; the cellars of a functionary’s grand mansion become the attics of a deserted building, while a cat-flap, crowned with an architrave added two hundred years later, serves as a tunnel into a coalhole, and a shelf has become the transept for a window with golden shields in the panes, and the skylight doesn’t open on the sky but on a gallery of waterwheels made of earthenware. A street that winds now up, now down, ends abruptly in a widow’s garden; a marketplace opens into a temple, and the cry of the seller of copper pots blends with the chants of the priest; the windows of a hospital ward for the dying open onto an ex-convict’s grog shop; the druggist has to cross the library of the Association of Master Stevedores in order to take a bath; a curly palm growing in the office of a justice of the peace reaches outside the building through a gap in the stonework. There are no vehicles because nothing wider than a man’s shoulders can get through the streets, which means that fat people and people carrying big loads have a terrible time even getting to the butcher’s to buy some nice tender lamb for next day’s dinner.

  And it wasn’t founded by the sword of a hero nor the sacrifice of a virgin, and it never was called Queen of the Dawn. Down there in the catacombs, currently painted with glow-in-the-dark colors, where dissolute teenagers dance and people who’re going to die get drunk—down there, when the Empire was young and struggling to unite, lived outlaws, smugglers, and assassins; and from there a mule-path led over the mountains and across the marshes to cities and towns where these gentlemen practiced their noble professions. Alas for the wretched beauty of the truth!

  A bit up the hill from the mouth of the catacombs stood a palace belonging to a person you’ve all heard of though you don’t know anything about him: Drauwdo the Brawny. It wasn’t really a palace but a big, ill-shaped, lopsided shed, wide and low-roofed, windowless, with an opening on the south side that you had to crawl into on all fours, a huge fireplace inside, and all round it a ditch filled with sharpened stakes pointing upward.

  Drauwdo was stupid, cruel, ignorant, and vain, and these qualities caused his downfall. Yet in his own way he was strong, valiant, and these qualities brought him briefly and violently to the top. He captained the outlaws and assassins; and around him, though not thanks to him, a ragged band took shape, that used assault and murder to get what they wanted—clothes, food, furniture, gold—above all, gold. The chief handed out rewards, a woman, an extra handful of jewels, a piece of land. And his followers imitated the chief and built stone houses, if you can call them houses, though most of the bunch went on huddling in the caves and tunnels.

  One of the not uncommon learnéd and progressive emperors one day leaned over a map of the Empire and by one banal gesture ended the ascendancy of Drauwdo the Brawny, the stupid, the vain, the cruel, the in-his-own-way valiant.

  “Here,” the emperor said, and put his manicured, bejeweled finger on a spot on the coastline of a cold and foggy sea far to the north. He looked at his engineers and geologists and the captains of his merchant marine and went on, “If we build a port here, transporting merchandise to the east will be much quicker and cheaper.”

  So the engineers and geologists set to work, the ship-captains waited, and Drauwdo, though he didn’t know it, was doomed.

  They laid out a roa
d from the far-off capital to the mountains, and Brawny’s bandits rushed happily forth from their stone houses and catacombs and killed the foremen and the workmen and robbed them of the little they had. Drauwdo congratulated his men and divided the loot equally among them. You see now why I called him stupid.

  The emperor said, “Bandits?”

  And a little captain, not particularly brave but not at all stupid, having received orders from a colonel who had received them from a general who had received them from a minister who had them from the emperor’s own lips, readied an ambush and, in three hours, without wrinkling his uniform or losing a man, disposed of Drauwdo and his assassins, his followers, his cavemen, and his smugglers—every last one of them, as he believed, and as he informed his superior officers; which accelerated his rise in the shock troops and also considerably hastened the hour of his death.

  But in fact one of Drauwdo’s men had escaped, fleeing in time to hide himself in the deepest caves. Oh, well, he wasn’t even a man, he was a kid they called Foxy, a prentice bandit, an insignificant leech, born and raised in the sewers of some city. Under Drauwdo he’d had nothing but dirty jobs to do and got slapped around and laughed at. But when the heads of Drauwdo and the other outlaws appeared along the road under construction, stuck on pikes, rotting in the sun, crawling with green-gold flies, there was Foxy’s head still stuck on his own neck, thinking the kind of thoughts such a head has learned to think.

  The road went round the mountains, crossed the plain, and cut across the marshes, which were drained and made fertile. The port was built, ships arrived, loaded wagons rolled along the way, and Foxy sat in the mouth of a cave and waited.

  By the time the illustrious emperor died and was succeeded by his even more illustrious son, the cave was empty and nobody sat waiting in its dark mouth. But just below, on the roadside, were inns, eating-houses, hostelries, and shops that sold axles, wheels, reins, fodder, cloaks, everything a wagon-driver might need. The owner of all this was a thin, dark, close-mouthed man with a foxy face, who had begun by selling wild fruit to the road-workers and had quickly made a fortune. He was called Nilkamm, a Southern name, but a name all the same, and he sat behind the desk of the principal inn watching his guests come and go, keeping an eye on his employees, calculating whether it would pay to build another hotel a bit farther on, maybe on the hillside, one with a lot of rooms and a terrace on the flat, and bring in some women from the capital.

  And when the young empress bore her second child, a daughter, Princess Hilfa of the unlucky name and unlucky life, Mr. Nilkamm’Dau was president of the Chamber of Commerce of his city, married to the widow of a magistrate from the capital, living in a big house built on foundations of stones from the misshapen houses of Drauwdo the Brawny’s followers; and the bawdy houses, the gambling houses, and the dubious hostelries had, nominally, another owner.

  It was now, by the way, a city: a city with wide but crooked streets that led to no port, no beach, no viewpoint, only to other crooked streets that ended in a dilapidated wall or an empty lot strewn with rubbish. There were more starving cats than there were glossy ponies with silver-mounted harness; there were more suicides than schoolmasters, more drunks than mathematicians, more cardsharps than musicians, more travelling salesmen than storytellers, more snake-charmers than architects, more quacks than poets. And yet, ah yet! it was a restless city, a city that was looking for something and didn’t know quite what, like all adolescents.

  It found what it was looking for, of course, found it with interest, as it got it all and lost it all and got it back and was the Jewel of the North and the Mother of the Arts and the Travellers’ Lighthouse and the Cradle of Fortune; as the legends grew of the unlucky heroes and persecuted virgins and wise visionaries and all that stuff, sublime, incredible, ridiculous, fake.

  The man was called Ferager-Manad. He was a sculptor and arrived richly dressed in a coach pulled by the first glossy ponies with silver-mounted harness the city had ever seen, attended by three servants. No doubt he’d spent his last penny on the coach and the ponies and the servants, since he wasn’t a very good sculptor and it was a long time since anybody had ordered an allegorical group or a monument or even a little bas-relief for a modest tombstone. All the same he certainly hoped to meet with good fortune in the city, because it was only twenty days since the death of Mr. Nilkamm’Dau, first mayor of the city, president of the Chamber of Commerce and of the Resident Founders Club, creator of the first Municipal Census, the first school, the first hospital, the first library, the first asylum, and the Department of Storage and Distribution of Meat, Leather, and Grain. Mr. Nilkamm’Dau’s widow, now twice widowed but no longer young, needed to provide further motives of admiration and respect as soon as possible, since, having secretly despised him for his lowly origin and because he was from the South, she now found herself with a fortune larger than she had ever calculated on even during nights of insomnia, and had resolved not only to show off a little of the money but also to excuse her scorn by thanking her silent husband for being rich and dying. A mausoleum, she thought, what a good idea. A mausoleum was what they needed, she, her dead second husband, and the humble cemetery in the suburbs. Let’s see, she said, a sculptor, a sculptor from the capital, an artist trained at the Imperial Academy, who’ll make a monument of pink and black marble crowned with mourning figures and covered with garlands and vases and surrounded by bronze palings with little pots where aromatic herbs are burning. And she chose a name at random, because she thought she’d seen it before and because it was on the list of graduates of the Academy.

  You’ve all seen the result: the beautiful marble ladies with marble tunics and floating marble hair gathered weeping about a prone figure, one of them lifting her hands to heaven, calling upon him who has left us. But the cemetery’s gone, taken over by the city that obliterated and forgot it. The crypt is a candy warehouse, and the mourning figures lean over the watertank that supplies the Registry of Real Estate. Yet this isn’t what matters in the order of events. The stone is worked, modeled, polished, the empty eyes of the statues gaze unseeing at people. What matters are the people, who have eyes that sometimes see. What matters is that the sculptor was a widower and poor and the woman who commissioned him was a widow and rich. They got married, not before the funeral monument was finished, as that would have been unseemly, but they got married the instant the aromatic herbs were set alight, and the sculptor paid his debts and acquired more servants and more carriages and more horses, and no longer worked in marble or bronze but became a patron of the arts, which is far less tiring, less risky, and more respectable.

  So the artists arrived. The first were mere rowdies and idlers who’d heard that there was a rich patron of the arts in that city who might provide them food and lodging while they sat around in cafés till dawn talking about the poems they were going to write, the pictures they were going to paint, the symphonies they were going to compose, sneering at the world which had so far failed to understand them and despising the rich man who insisted that he did understand them and who, before paying for their bed and wine and soup, made them listen to him describing his own works of art and, even worse, giving them advice. But later on came another sort, who only sat around in cafés occasionally and spent most of their time shut away in silence weaving words or mixing sounds or colors. Among these artists who came to the city, early or late, some lacked talent, some lacked discipline, some lacked dedication, but all had a good deal of imagination. The city ascended and twisted yet again: it gained not elegance but a certain eccentric, unexpected beauty. Windowed galleries were built, which you reached by stairways that took off from anywhere, from the middle of a street, from the second-floor balcony of a house, even from other stairways; circular houses were built, labyrinthine houses, underground houses, tiny studios, huge music halls, chamber theaters, concert stadiums. The fashion changed, and the austere suits of businessmen and the gloomy high-necked gowns of their wives gave place to purple and green blous
es, paint-splashed smocks, capes, tunics, stoles, naked torsos, sandals, boots, embroidered slippers, bare feet, flowered kerchiefs, cothurns, gold chains, rings worn in one ear, necklaces, bracelets, headbands, tattoos, bodices, colored beads glued on the forehead, anklets, cameos. Schedules changed too: the city that used to get up early, hurry through breakfast, work, eat lunch quietly at home, go back to work, eat dinner with the family and go to bed as the stars came out, little by little disappeared. Offices and institutions opened now about noon, afternoon was the busy time, cafés and restaurants were always crowded, and at night the city glittered. From the distant port far to the north they saw above the mountains a halo of light that never went out but only paled with the rising of the sun.

  But let’s not forget Ferager-Manad and his wife. She got no chance at a third husband, a pity, if you think of what a stunning funeral monument she could have raised to this one now that she had so many sculptors at hand to choose from. She died of a stroke one summer evening and I’m sorry to say that her widower didn’t give a thought to mausoleums but only to going out every night with his protégés to try new drinks and new girls while they discussed pure form or the transcendent contents of line. Having filled several years with productive discussions and investigations, he died of pneumonia and was buried, unceremoniously because little remained of the immense fortune his wife had left him, and not where he belonged, because the door of the mausoleum surmounted by mourning figures had stuck shut and couldn’t be opened.

  Now we mustn’t forget the capital. The imperial throne was occupied by Mezsiadar III the Ascetic, a well-meaning man, who spent so much time and so much energy in doing good that he succeeded in doing as much harm as twenty emperors of egregious iniquity. Mezsiadar wished all his subjects to be good, a dangerous wish. Gone were the peaceful days of the dynasty of the Danoubbes, founded centuries ago by Callasdanm the Fat, an emperor neither good nor bad, who understood, perhaps through laziness, that men and women are neither good nor bad and that it’s best to let them go on being that way. The current rulers were the Embaroddar, of whom it was said, “Black great-grandfather, white grandfather, black father, white son, black grandson, white great-grandson,” because if one of them reigned well the next was certain to be a disaster, and if one reigned badly people took comfort in the knowledge that the next would bring blessings to his people. The Embaroddars knew the saying too, and as Mezsiadar II had been a good emperor, Mezsiadar III was certain to bring misfortune to all; except that he had decided otherwise; which was precisely why he did exactly what was expected of the members of that long dynasty, which happened to be on the point of ending, though nobody at the moment knew it.