“‘You’ll never see the like of these, kid, no way. This is a tripestone, this is a hiddenstone, this is a bilestone, and they’re all magic. Tripestone makes hair grow, strengthens the kidneys, whitens the teeth. Hiddenstone enriches the blood, cures eye disease, takes off smallpox scars, and heals broken bones. Bilestone cures jaundice, stops vomiting, and drives away nightmares and madness.’ He’d laugh and close up his hand. ‘And the three together give a man what he needs to satisfy every woman he meets, and keep death away.’
“The tripestone was greyish brown, opaque, wrinkled; the hiddenstone was darker, almost black, and smooth, soft to the touch; the bilestone was greenish, with brighter, yellowish veins. The hiddenstone was the tricobezoar.
“I hadn’t looked at them since the day he was buried, when I’d dumped out what was in the leather bag he always kept with him and in the heap of filthy stuff found them and the silver tea-stirrer, which I kept. I didn’t believe in magic but still I kept the three stones because how can you not believe in magic? I don’t say it doesn’t exist, all I say is I wouldn’t trust one minute of my life to it.
“So I went to the palace. I could have sent a servant with the stones, but I was curious to see the house of power. It didn’t impress me, maybe because I was prepared to be astonished and diminished by the magnificence and pomp. Magnificence was there, wealth, luxury, and power, but no beauty, no interest, or passion, or intelligence. It was just a big business office where everybody worked very hard. I showed my three stones to a bureaucrat who examined them and gave me back the two that couldn’t help the emperor. Then he thanked me, praised my generosity, and asked me very pleasantly what my name was and where I lived. And I went back to my house which was quite beautiful, sufficiently luxurious, very small compared to the palace, and more and more boring.
“A month after that the imperial messenger came.
“My husband, his children, his sons-in-law and daughters-in-law got all excited and kept asking me questions. I told them about the tricobezoar, saying that when I was a little girl I’d been given it by a servant in my parents’ country house, because I’d never told them the truth about my childhood—why should I? And I told the messenger that I was quite willing to go to the palace next day to see the emperor.
“I wasn’t the only one. Twenty-three people had given their hiddenstones to prevent the emperor’s hemorrhages, and he called them in one by one and thanked them, because it had now been many days since he’d had bleeding or swellings in his joints. My husband’s daughters and daughters-in-law wanted me to wear every jewel I had; they wanted their father to buy me a new gown and coat and shoes and gloves and fan and hairdo; they wanted me to shadow my eyelids and pluck my eyebrows and paint my cheeks and mouth. I said no. With a smile, because they were good girls and terribly upset, but I said no. Next day the poor things were almost in tears seeing me put on a simple blue dress, shoes that were nice but not new and not particularly showy, plain blue gloves, and no jewels, none at all. You can’t, you just can’t! they said. At least wear this gold chain, or a pearl necklace, or your diamond ring, something, a jeweled belt, a pin . . . The carriage came. I kissed my husband and the girls and went to the palace.
“The emperor didn’t much impress me either, since I’d seen sick men before, past hope, near death, past relief and remedy. He received me very simply, looked at me attentively, smiled, and said he was extremely grateful. And the doctors and counselors around him looked at me with curiosity. I held up my head and looked right back at them, one by one, without the slightest timidity, and not with curiosity but with such cold lack of interest that one of them nearly said something but didn’t, and another flinched as if I’d threatened him. I did it deliberately, of course. And then I ceased to look at them, as if they weren’t there. Nor did I raise my eyes when they all left the room at a sign from the emperor. He told me to sit beside him and asked my name, though he certainly already knew it, and what my husband did, and if I had children, and how I had come by the hiddenstone.
“Magic can’t be trusted, I assure you; what’s useful is quickness and certainty in making up one’s mind. And that’s not magic even if it looks like it, because you can only do it when you’ve learned to think your own thoughts. In those few minutes I had realized that the emperor was dying, that some of the people around him were fakes and the rest incompetents, and that here, at the throne, I could find a use for the energy I wasted moving furniture around my house, building pergolas in my garden, studying budgets and markets in my husband’s office. Once I knew that and knew I knew it and discussed it with myself and accepted it, when the emperor asked how I’d come by the stone, I told him the truth and added, truthfully, that he and I alone knew it. Then he asked me—what could he ask me? come on, that one’s easy—a man who ruled the world, sick, exhausted, smothered in praise and adulation, disappointed, disillusioned—what could he ask me? Why I’d told him what I told him. And this time I didn’t answer with the truth. Of course not. I told him that my secret weighed upon me, not always but sometimes, which wasn’t true. I told him that when I felt especially happy or unhappy my secret weighed most heavily and was hardest to bear. And, of course, he asked me whether at the moment I was happy or unhappy, and I said: Both. In short, I drew him deeper into the informality that he had chosen for these meetings with people who’d parted with their hiddenstones for his sake. And by giving a personal tone to what was said I confused him, so that I could reassure him immediately, as if he was the one doing me a favor. He found this all so unexpected that I was the only one of the twenty-three who spent the whole afternoon with the emperor. And the only one who came back, once and again.”
Yes, said the storyteller: her influence in the imperial government began long before she became the Great Empress, long before she ascended to the throne. She was still the wife of the rich landowner and flour and grain merchant, she had no position, no official designation, but the emperor listened to her. At first he didn’t follow her advice, or not always, and didn’t base his decisions on her opinions; but the woman disconcerted him because she showed him things in another light, from different angles, turned them into something very different from what they’d seemed, and at the same time explained to him how he could understand how a minister felt, an employee, a rich man, a poor laborer, a fisherman, a nobleman, a bureaucrat, a soldier: in a word, how to make governing not a heavy legacy but a vocation, an adventure. For the first time in years, perhaps in his whole life, the emperor was happy; no less ill for that, but happy and serene. And the people felt the same. It was thanks to her, to give just one example, that the stevedores’ strike was settled, which had threatened to become a bloody struggle. On the advice of a couple of rapacious little men, the emperor was about to order the army to intervene, when Abderjhalda spoke up, and we know now what that means. While the emperor was reading the decree before signing it, she was drinking tea, looking out the window, very interested in what she saw out there, beyond the palace walls. And as if she wasn’t talking to him, and as if it didn’t matter at all to her what he was doing and was about to do, she said:
“There was a doctor that looked after a rich man who had a chronic illness. One day the sick man had a very serious attack, painful, cruel, and his children asked the doctor not to try and prolong his life, since death would free him from all suffering. ‘Yes, that’s true,’ the doctor thought, ‘they’re right: the sick man will rest at last, I’ll be well paid both for doctoring him and setting him free from his torment, and I won’t have to go on year after year, day after day, night after night, vainly rushing here to give the poor man some useless medicine; and the children will inherit, and won’t suffer because their father’s in pain, and they’ll remember him fondly.’ But before he quite resolved to suspend treatment, he looked into their eyes, those children of his patient. And he looked into the sick man’s eyes. And he looked at himself in a mirror on the wall across the room. The children’s eyes were bright; the sick man
’s eyes were opaque; and on the day, not far off now, when death came at last, women would drape black cloth across the mirror. He saw another solution, then, which would do as much good as the first one to the sick man and to himself, though not to the children; but it would be much fairer to them all.”
The Emperor Idraüsse IV looked at the mirrors of his salon and said, “I understand.”
The soldiers stayed shut up in their quarters waiting for an order which didn’t come. Three days later the stevedores marched in front of the palace shouting hurray for the emperor, and the day after that they went back to work.
The members of the council, the ministers, and the secretaries all hated her, of course, but she didn’t oppose them, or sneer at them, or try to win them over; she ignored them. They didn’t exist, she didn’t see or hear them, didn’t know they were there. One of them tried to put a stop to her visits to the palace, but his machinations were so clumsy that they resulted in his being exiled to Lemnarabad. Another tried to collude with her, another made an attempt on her life, and so on, until, defeated though they didn’t want to admit it, they agreed the best thing to do was wait till her influence over the emperor waned and ceased, as had happened before. A vain hope, and in their hearts they knew it, but what else could they do?
Mr. Ereddam’Ghcen died of a sudden pneumonia, and she buried him with pomp and ceremony, wept for him, and wore mourning for him. When she began to go out again, she went to the palace, sat down with the emperor, and explained to him, clearly, mildly, firmly, what would become of the Empire if he died a childless widower; and then she explained what would become of the Empire while he lived and when he died, if he married her. A year later the Emperor Idraüsse IV, ninth ruler of the dynasty of the Elkerides, married Abderjhalda and crowned her empress.
The whole Empire looked with distrust on this woman of whom little was known and much spoken, young, not beautiful, not an aristocrat, a rich merchant’s widow, hard, not delicately educated nor marvelously elegant, and they asked what disasters she’d cause, how many of her relatives she’d make ministers and generals, what luxuries or vices she’d spend money on, how much longer the sick emperor would live now. The whole Empire was mistaken. There were no new ministers or generals, no wild orgies, no lovers, no poison in the emperor’s soup. Everything went on as before, or at least seemed to. At first the empress was no more than she’d been before, a confidante or counselor. She sat on the throne beside the emperor; she came to his bed sometimes, though the disease in his blood kept him from doing anything but talking with her or sleeping by her side, so that it appeared that he would indeed die childless and his dynasty would end with him; she appeared at official ceremonies; and that was all. She began by employing her energy for herself: she learned to read and write, to speak all the dialects of the Empire, she learned law, economics, mathematics, though she didn’t want to hear anything about chemistry or astronomy; she learned geography and strategy, and summoned a storyteller, a young man who’d recently begun practicing his trade in the streets and squares, to tell her about those who had sat before her on the Golden Throne.
At the end of two or three years, Abderjhalda knew a great deal, the people were already calling her the Great Empress, and the emperor left the government in her hands while his illness slowly grew worse. The time came when he was rarely able to get up, dress, walk, or eat without help. Yet he lived several years more. The Great Empress looked after him herself: she chose his doctors and attendants, checked that his medicines were given, that he ate as he should and received the injections and cauteries and treatments for his twisted limbs whenever it was necessary. This was why he had some good spells, when he felt almost like a well man who can sign a document or lean out a window or stop in the middle of a walk to ask a question, bow, look at the west, go on walking. . . . This was why he was able at last, twice, painfully, perilously, to have relations with the empress; and though he considered it a miracle, or to be precise two miracles, because he didn’t think that he’d fully and totally played his part on either of those two sad nights, this was why the empress bore two sons, Eggrizen and Fenabber. The elder, Eggrizen, is our present emperor, Idraüsse V.
“Yes,” the empress said, “that was one of the reasons, of course it was. I didn’t pick you just because you were a good storyteller, though that was part of it. But there were other good storytellers, cleverer, wiser, more famous, and I could have chosen any one of them, except that the reason they were cleverer and wiser was that they were older, sometimes a lot older. Maybe you’ll be like them one day, and even greater than they. I believe you will. I had to be able to believe it, because my sons, who are going to sit on the throne of Empire, have to be not just strong and healthy and handsome, they have to have that vein of madness and passion that lets a man or a woman see the other world which is the shadow of this one, and of which this world is the shadow. And now, good-bye till tomorrow.”
Yes, said the storyteller, the emperor died not long after, when Prince Eggrizen was playing in the palace gardens and his teachers were getting ready to teach him to read, to ride, to command, and when Prince Fenabber was beginning to walk and babble. There’d be no more princes of the Elkerides, to be sure, but the succession was assured, a great relief to many who had feared new struggles for power. And they could rest easy, as it was clear that the Great Empress was strong enough to put down any attempt to prevent her sons from inheriting the throne. And the people loved her: neither she nor her boys needed watchmen or guards, for only a madman or an idiot, seeing her in danger, would have gone on sitting on the doorstep in the sun and not rushed to defend her with their life. She arranged the strangest burial ever heard of for the dead emperor. It was as splendid as most imperial funerals, but an edict prohibited gifts and requested music and flowers. And whoever wished, man, woman, or child, noble or commoner, soldier or beggar, could enter the palace mortuary, at any time, without precedencies or protocols, and say farewell to their emperor. The most skillful embalmers had hurried from Irbandil and worked so swiftly, using all their craft and knowledge, that the emperor lay now, serene and beautiful, his troubled blood at peace at last, a smile on his pale lips, among brocaded silks and down cushions, and his subjects came by him and some paused and raised a hand to touch his forehead or cheek or the fringe of his garments. And they all felt, faintly or deeply according to their capacity to feel, the sadness of ending, of knowing this was the end, that never again would Idraüsse sit on the golden seat of the Lords of the Empire, or open his eyes to the morning, or even feel pain, that he’d never talk to his children, never put on the soft slippers that didn’t hurt his feet, that his rings and his dreams and his clothes and his thoughts and his pain were useless, empty, and that even if someone else used them they wouldn’t be the same. For thirty days the viewing went on, then he was buried. During those thirty days I didn’t go to the palace and didn’t see the empress or her sons. Afterwards I kept on going there to tell her the history of the emperors. And while I told my tales, secretly in the palace and openly in tents that kept getting bigger and fancier, the Empire prospered, grew rich and peaceful. Now and then there was a commotion, naturally; people got restless. But then they found there was no reason for it, and with the passage of years the subjects of the Empire learned to replace restlessness by an expectancy that easily became enthusiasm, whether they understood the cause of it or not. For example: a year after Idraüsse’s death the empress named as Finance Minister a Southerner, a self-taught man with no pompous titles from the Imperial Academies, and she awarded the Imperial Prize of Art to a Southern painter, a scruffy, mannerless fellow who, in a miserable cane shack beside the marshes, had painted cruel, masterful works satirizing the government and blaming it for the poverty and backwardness of his land. The Empire feared the worst. But Clabb-lar-Klabbe was the best finance minister the Empire had had for millennia, and you know I’m not exaggerating, you know there was and still is and will be for years to come enough money for
universities and hospitals, for aid to the sick and the poor and the handicapped, for helping those who can’t help themselves, for restorations and conservation and embellishment, for better roads and ports, for building museums and schools, for making sure everybody has light, heat, and food. And you know that she didn’t confront the South with weapons, or decrees, or disdain, as so many emperors had done, but tried to understand, and did. Maybe she discovered new thoughts, I don’t know. She understood that the transformation of the South would come, if ever, from its own marshes, its intransigent tribes, its forest towns and lake cities, not from the throne. She understood that such a transformation might not be pleasant or convenient, and that the best she could do was to keep the South at peace, without violence. Hence, she put up no resistance: she recognized the existence of the South, removed all military garrisons from the borders, had the fences and barriers and barbed wire cleared away, encouraged and even flattered the rebels, gave in on a lot of little points of which she exaggerated the importance and held firm on a few big issues which she played down. And the Southern rebels began doing business with the northern lands, visited the cities, toured the palace, smiled, and fell asleep.
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