Kalpa Imperial

by LAngelica Gorodischer, Ursula K. Le Guin

  Mother of the Arts is what they were calling the city then, and its inhabitants (poor twits) took great pride in such a fine name. Mezsiadar the Ascetic heard about this “Mother of the Arts” business and was suspicious, not because he distrusted the arts but because by inclination and conviction he was suspicious of everything. He asked for information, and the city officials (poor twits) wrote an enthusiastic and detailed memorandum. So as a precautionary measure Mezsiadar the Ascetic had them beheaded.

  “What?” cried the emperor, reaching page  of the -page memorandum. “Where is piety? Where is decency? Where is prudence, modesty, frugality, selflessness? Where?”

  Mezsiadar III the Ascetic was afraid of himself and his nights were sleepless. This, I think, explains it all. After ordering that the city functionaries have their heads removed, he sat alone in the shadows, in a bare, cold room, and thought intensely about the many-colored city that came alive at night, about the barefoot dreamers and the naked models, about promiscuity, absinthe, idleness; he thought about what goes on in darkness, he thought about caresses and murmurs, he thought about carpeted rooms, hoarse voices, stringed instruments lazily twanging, about narrow staircases leading up to stifling rooms where the shapes of bodies can be only guessed and an exotic odor tickles the nostrils, he thought about tongues, breasts, thighs, genitals and buttocks, in paintings and songs, fleshy, swaying, bulging, teasing, heavy, foully desirable. That night he sent dinner away untasted, lay down on his comfortless bed, and fell into a fever. Next day two army battalions left for the city.

  When the last of the artists, actors, poets, musicians, what have you, had been killed or had escaped, the soldiers painted all the facades of buildings greenish grey, cut back the vines, and sprayed disinfectant on the garrets, the glass-roofed studios, and the music rooms. Paintings and lutes and books were all dumped into a great bonfire, which for the last time brightened the night sky over the mountains. The city remained a barracks as long as Mesziadar the Ascetic lived, though that didn’t help give him peaceful nights or fewer headaches and belly cramps. On the contrary. His arms, shoulders, and head broke out in a pustulent eczema, which he considered to be a punishment for his failure to discover at once what was going on in the mountain city. So he sought information on all the other cities in the Empire, now very numerous; but what was going on in the other cities of the Empire doesn’t enter into my story. A nobleman of his entourage turned the pages of the innumerable reports for the emperor, since his hands were tied to the arms of his chair to prevent him from scratching. He didn’t die of the itch, nor did he die while reading reports; he died a few years later, when nothing was left of the eczema but scars, and the palace doctors said his liver had burst, who knows why.

  He was succeeded by Riggameth II, a “white” Emperor, who had hated his father deeply since boyhood and went on hating him even after his death. Thus he tried to undo everything the Ascetic had done. Though Riggameth lived into old age he didn’t have time to undo absolutely everything, but he managed a good deal. For one thing, he kicked the army out of the grey city.

  The soldiers and captains and lieutenants departed. Some people painted their houses white or pink or green. A boy composed a song, a woman sketched a landscape, and neither got hanged for it. A theater opened, one or two vines put out buds. And though never again was it the Mother of the Arts, the city acquired a reasonable quota of musicians, actors, and poets.

  And then in the arcane order of events, two women appeared. One of them would have gained the Ascetic’s entire approval since she was a widow, pure, and stupid; she had known only one man in her life, and had considered the experience a prolonged torture. The other woman he would have had burned in the public square as indecent, which she was, as immodest, which she was, and as promiscuous, which she also was.

  Neither woman was young, and both remembered the city as it had been before the pious intervention of the late emperor. The widow enjoyed gardening and embroidery, the other one enjoyed men. The widow venerated the memory of Mezsiadar, the other one spat when she heard his name. The widow was digging in her garden to plant a shoot of trissingalia adurata when she found her hands wet with hot water that seemed to be rising up from deep in the earth. The other had been a model and lover of painters and sculptors, and then had opened an inn for officers; the money from artists and from army men had run out and she was wondering what kind of business to start up, something entertaining, a place where lots of people would come, where she could talk with lots of clients and maybe, too, why not, maybe, even though she wasn’t the girl she used to be, maybe . . .

  It was thus that the springs of the thermal baths were discovered. One woman found her garden full of salty water which killed off her plants, and in disappointment put her house up for sale. Another woman bought it, thinking that the big front room could be used as a tea-room; but since the water kept welling up, she called the neighborhood schoolmaster and asked him what it was.

  The first hot bath of the city was established in the garden court of a recently purchased house which hadn’t yet become a tea-room. The widow who liked gardening brought suit, charging that the other woman knew what was rising from under the ground and had fraudulently paid much less than the property was worth. But the other one laughed, and even offered money in compensation, and when the widow wouldn’t take it left the affair to her attorneys and turned her attention to her business, so that she didn’t notice, or if she noticed didn’t think it very important, that the widow lost her suit. She got rich, in any case, very rich—I don’t mean the widow but the other one, of course—and ended up running more than a dozen thermal establishments, until she married, sold some of them, hired managers for the rest, and went travelling. Her husband was a penniless nobleman, a very handsome man, very quiet, very elegant, who was even rather fond of her. And it was she who built the Fountain of the Five Rivers.

  A spa city can’t be grey. It became white. Hotels sprang up, consulting rooms, rest homes; there was soft music playing to relax patients resting in their rooms or getting massages or working out in gyms or lying in mudbaths; crystal tinkled in lampshades, vases, glasses; and nobody from the emperor on down found anything to complain about, nobody except the invalids, who whined because they were invalids, because the massage was too rough or too mild, because the water was too cold or too hot, too deep or not deep enough, because they didn’t have enough blankets or too many blankets. But the invalids kept coming, often from a great distance, to spend their money in the city, so everybody listened to them smiling and tried, if there was time enough, to satisfy them.

  Now I’m going to tell you about Blaggarde II, the Listener, an emperor who had dreams and visions and heard voices speaking from stones, but wasn’t a bad ruler, all the same. Or could it have been because he saw visions and heard voices that he wasn’t a bad ruler? A small problem, which a teller of tales doesn’t have to pretend to solve; so let’s go on. For at least three hundred years the warm mineral waters had sprung up from the earth, and people had built ingenious and beautiful devices for the liquid that had enriched them and brought them peace. The Fountain of the Five Rivers never ceased to run; statues of dancing women spouted transparent jets from their mouths; stone figures of chubby children cupped their hands under bronze spouts; great alabaster cups, winged monsters with open beaks, improbable bouquets of marble sent streams of water falling into tanks and thence into bathing ponds and swimming pools and artificial lakes, when Blaggarde II marched south to put down the rebellion. We know now how that expedition ended and what effect it had on Blaggarde the Listener, his dynasty, and the history of the Empire. But what the chronicles don’t always say is that the wound that finally brought the emperor to his death remained unhealed ever after the day of the last battle. No surgeon succeeded in closing it even temporarily. A year after the expedition to the south, somebody told the emperor about the waters which cured all ills, in the mountain city called, at that time, Star of Hope; an
d the Listener took to the road once again, not south this time but north, not on horseback in full dress uniform but lying in a litter and covered with woolen cloaks and blankets, not with songs but with lamentations, not surrounded by soldiers but by doctors and nurses. And he found a charming white city, sprawling but solid, where voices and music never got too loud, where nothing was done in a hurry, and where almost everybody who walked the streets or leaned on the windowsills had eyes as dull as those of the Lord of the Empire.

  He built himself a palace. A real one this time, not a shapeless stone den but a palace bristling with towers, flanked by terraces and gardens looked out upon by the tall blue-paned windows of the dining rooms and retiring rooms and the tall red or yellow-paned windows of the gaming rooms and party rooms: a palace of limitless apartments and interminable corridors, with its own water-fountains for the sick emperor.

  Blaggarde the Listener did not lay aside his duties. He no longer wore a coat of mail nor went to war, and day and night his life drained from the oozing wound, but he never ceased to busy himself with the tasks of empire. He saw his ministers first, then his secretaries. He had to keep in touch with the administrators and people in contact with the distant capital. Then noblemen appeared with their relatives and servants. And when the emperor brought the empress and his children to live with him, noblewomen came too, and teachers, palace provisioners, more noble families, and bodyguards and lickspittles and all the rabble that surrounds the powerful.

  Once again the city changed. Many buildings came down to make room for the great houses of lordly folk; whole blocks were cleared for parks and gardens; the streets were widened so coaches could pass; the desert was watered to grow fruits and greens and flowers for a population now covering the mountains and overflowing onto the plain. Not everything was destroyed, though. Some things remained: the waters that cured all ills, or almost all, the Fountain of the Five Rivers, the underground tunnels of Drauwdo the Brawny, a few inexplicable foundations of rough stone, the mausoleum built by the city’s first mayor, and here and there an eccentric staircase in the middle of a street.

  The emperor’s wound stopped oozing, but its inflamed lips would not join, even when painfully sutured or even more painfully cauterized. The emperor realized, or maybe the stones spoke and told him, that his life would end here. So he signed a decree making the mountain city the capital of the Empire. The whole Empire looked towards the new capital. All roads led to the mountains, across what had been the desert; all ambitious men dreamed of living there and some managed to do it, and for many centuries after that time there was no capital so splendid, so rich, so active, so beautiful, so prosperous. The dynasties of the Selbiddoës, of the Avvoggardios, and of the Rubbaerderum governed the vast Empire from that city, sometimes well, sometimes pretty well, sometimes badly, as usual; and the water went on welling up, and some palaces fell down and others were built, and some streets were closed off and others were opened up between the houses and the parks, and women bore children, poets sang, thieves stole, tellers of tales sat in tents and talked to people, archivists went on classifying ancient writings, judges sat in judgment, couples loved and wept, men fought for stupid things that in any case weren’t going to last long, gardeners produced new varieties of eggplant, assassins lurked in shadows, kids invented games, blacksmiths hammered, madmen howled, girls fell in love, unhappy men hanged themselves, and one day a girl was born with her eyes open.

  It’s not so rare as most people think. Kids do get born open-eyed, though it’s true that they generally arrive with their eyes sensibly closed. But everybody believes that the open eyes of a newborn baby signify great events, fortunate or unfortunate, in the life of that child. And her parents committed the blunder of repeating that belief out of vainglory, and of repeating it to her, in order to prepare her for her destiny; and the girl believed them. If it had been anything else she probably would have smiled, as girls smile at the stupidities of their parents, and forgotten all about it; but if you’re told your life is going to be full of tremendous events you’re likely to believe it. When Sesdimillia was ten, she looked around and wondered where the great events were going to come from, the fame, the tragedy, the martyrdom, the bliss, the glory. The city worked and played and lived and died, and up there stood the shining imperial palace.

  “I’m going to be empress,” she said to herself.

  Her chance of coming to the throne was slight, as her ancestors weren’t royalty or aristocrats, only moderately prosperous merchants. But she got there.

  When she was twenty the old Emperor Llandoïvar died at the age of a hundred and one and was succeeded by his great-grandson Ledonoïnor, all his children and grandchildren having already died. The new emperor came very near to marrying the daughter of a duke with whom he used to play in the palace gardens when they were little children. But Ledonoïnor the Vacant wasn’t called that for nothing. He didn’t love the duke’s daughter because, it seemed, he loved nobody and nothing and had no interest in anybody or anything. Nor did he love the dark-haired, active, efficient, handsome, hard girl who oddly enough held the post of Chief of the Internal Vigilance Forces in the palace, which she had won two years ago, disguised as a man, demonstrating greater skill and strength in armed and unarmed combat than her many male opponents. But two months before the emperor’s wedding with the duke’s daughter, an assassin somehow made his way into the palace and raised his sword against Ledonoïnor I, and the girl shortened him by a head with his own weapon, and the emperor married her, because when he promised her whatever reward she wanted for saving his life she said to him, “Marry me, sir.” Though there was no proof and no witnesses it was said that she had provoked the assault, had paid the would-be regicide, and had promised him he’d go free. It’s quite possible; what then? Greater infamies than that take place in the palaces of emperors, from which everybody suffers, nobles and commoners, rich and poor. In this case nobody suffered, not even the duke’s daughter, who took it hard at first, but who married a man she could love and hate and who could love and hate her. The emperor didn’t suffer because he didn’t know how to suffer. The empress got what she wanted. And the people were all right because she governed well, really well.

  Fortunately Ledonoïnor the Vacant spent his time walking through the gardens and galleries with his empty eyes fixed on emptiness and his soul empty and inert in his empty body and left her to rule, efficiently, harshly sometimes, but always with style. Every now and then she called him to her apartments, and nine months later the Empire had a new prince, and so it went for five years, until the emperor died of a tumor in his belly, probably because there was so much emptiness in there that it could grow as it liked till it suffocated him.

  And a short while after, another rebellion arose in the south. The widowed empress put on the men’s clothes she used to wear and her armor, and marched like so many other rulers to defend the unity of the Empire. She defended and won it in a single engagement, the Battle of the Field of Nnarient, on which the South bowed its fierce, rebellious head. She won the victory because she was brave, because she believed in what she was doing, because she knew to control armies, and because the leader of the rebellion was a fool. Handsome, ardent, but a fool.

  The Treaty of Nnarient-Issinn was signed, unique in the history of the Empire: the South submitted unconditionally and swore fealty to the empress. She moved the capital to the border between the rebel territories and the states of the North, and married the ardent fool. Putting the capital on the border was a bold strategic move which assured peace for many years more than could have been expected when dealing with the South. Such was not the case with the empress’s marriage to the rebel chief. She married him because it was her destiny, or so say those who believe in the destiny of those born with their eyes open. I say she married him because she was one of those empresses who had enough power to do whatever she liked. And they were happy, and provided the Empire with more princes and a fresh royal lineage, but you can read al
l that in any historical treatise or booklet of love poems, and in any case it doesn’t matter to us.

  What matters to us is what happened in the city in the mountains. People drifted away from the palaces, the great houses, the elegant shops, the parks and gardens and avenues. The nobles left, the gentlefolk, the rich folk, the field marshals, the ladies, the antiquaries, the jewelers, the cabinetmakers, they all left. People of no importance stayed on, some sentimentalists, owners of small businesses, owners of spas, people who had been there, like their parents and grandparents, for a long, long time. The mansions were divided and subdivided again and again, doors were cut in unexpected places, and ramps and staircases led up to higher floors that were no longer part of a house but a whole house, or several houses. Every bedroom, every spacious drawing room was made into two or even three apartments for humble families by putting up partitions and screens and enclosing balconies as kitchens. Corridors cut through rooms and, after various contortions, opened onto the street. The facades deteriorated, losing their paint and carvings. Some windows were sealed, others cut open; the street doors were no longer used, and their hinges and knockers didn’t work. As this went on the streets grew narrower because so many lean-tos and sheds and enclosures were built up against outside walls, and the city acquired a silence, a mystery, it had never had before. Yet it wasn’t a silence of menace, but of resignation. It went on so for years and years, growing ever more jumbled, more intricate, more improbable. Whole neighborhoods stood silent and abandoned. A street of elegant, unchanged houses, or of mansions bulging with labyrinthine apartments, behind which were precarious structures in what had been a park, led suddenly to a string of low, gloomy shop-buildings. And then came semi-detached palaces, and lonesome avenues where the grass grew and where many-colored awnings, now stiff with dirt, that had once sheltered the nobility at their games, now protected opticians, fortune tellers, dentists, masseuses, academies of physical fitness, dyers, and seamstresses.