Kalpa Imperial

by LAngelica Gorodischer, Ursula K. Le Guin

  “A lot of asses,” said the emperor, breathing heavily and clutching the arms of his chair to keep his hands from trembling, “and he was the most asinine of the lot. Steamed fish, potatoes, tubelid roots, bah!”

  When Veevil fled from the house where the Imperial Guardsmen were cutting the conspirators’ throats, her only thought was to get out of the capital that night. She ran and ran, crossing streets and parks, her hand over her mouth so that nobody could hear her sobbing. All at once she stopped, sat down on the doorstep of a house, and thought. Why was she on the run? Nobody knew her name, any more than she knew the names of the other members of the group. So nobody was going to denounce her, even if some had been saved from the slaughter to be tortured. What’s more, others might have got away as she had. What she had to do was stay in the capital, wait a while, try to find others who had escaped, and with them reorganize the rebellion to bring down this emperor who cared nothing for his people. She got up from the doorstep and, walking tranquilly, not sobbing, swinging her arms like any carefree young woman, went home. Her parents and brothers were asleep. She went up the stairs quietly and to her room. She didn’t light the lights, she got undressed, opened the balcony door that looked out to the back, and smiled to see in the big house across the gardens a light still burning: the old doctor was studying. Or sitting by a sick person, or meditating, or whatever. She got into bed and fell asleep.

  Some days went by, maybe some weeks. The empress was in a vile humor. So was the captain of the Guards. The emperor didn’t see death waiting but his hands trembled and he felt shooting pains in the nape of his neck. People went into the white house on the tree-lined street and Veevil greeted the old doctor from her balcony when she saw him walk in the garden and sit by the pool, and he smiled at her. Sometimes he raised his hand in a gesture of salute and sat watching her, thinking how beautiful she was.

  In the middle of spring a square, solid, serious man came in the front door. Passing through the courtyard where the buried treasure was said to be, near the gurgling fountain, under the trees whose leaves moved with a sound of silky paper and the birds swelled out their chests calling to one another, he made no wrong turns and did not lose his temper as the Duke of Asfiddes had. He waited a moment and looked about, and then clapped his hands and cried, “Hey! Anybody here?”

  His voice rang out and was amplified as it struck the white walls and came back to him as if from a secret grotto beyond the inhabited parts of the house. But nobody answered. He returned to the courtyard, and as the duke had done, opened several doors. And going from one door to the next he saw the arcade almost hidden by creepers and went along it and came to the vine-hidden door, approached it, opened it. The man sitting cross-legged on the mat on the stone floor opened his eyes. “Good day,” he said.

  “Ah, good day,” said the other. “I’m looking for the doctor.”

  “That’s me.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Yes.”

  So he entered the room and glanced round, looking for a chair, a bench, something to sit down on, and for medical instruments and bottles of medicines, and saw nothing. Accordingly he took two steps and sat down on the mat.

  “I’m ill,” he said.

  “Hmm,” the doctor said, “yes, but it’s not serious.”

  The man was silent a moment looking at him.

  “How can you possibly know? I haven’t been in this room five seconds.”

  “If it was serious, your body would force you to feel some kind of fear. And all fears are exclusive: yours wouldn’t have allowed you to take any interest in what you found in the room.”

  “Good,” the man said, “good. You may be right.”

  “What is your work?”

  “I’m a merchant,” the man said. “I deal in glass. Glass goods.”

  “What need is there to lie?”

  “Eh?”

  “Selling glass doesn’t lead to callused hands, or a straight spine with the shoulders back.”

  The man turned his head and let his gaze wander over the walls and the window that gave on the garden. He finally looked again at the doctor. “Actually,” he said, “I was a dealer in glass and crystal a long time ago, and I’d like to do that again, but at present I’m a workman.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “And what is it that makes you feel sick?”

  “It hurts here.”

  “Did you go to school when you were a boy?”

  “Yes,” the man said.

  “What did you like best to study?”

  “Nothing. I hated studying.”

  “Ah,” said the doctor.

  “Sometimes I feel a burning cold that rises from my stomach into my throat.”

  “Ah,” the doctor said again. “And if now you had the time and money for studying, which would you prefer, mathematics or music?”

  The man thought it over. “Mathematics,” he said, opening his eyes wide.

  “Why?”

  “It’s more useful. I don’t say I don’t enjoy music, but if you want music you hire a musician.”

  “Possibly,” said the doctor. “Have you ever had the impression of having known for a long time a person you’ve just met?”

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “Maybe so, I don’t remember, one of those notions you have when you’re very young.”

  “Is there a very deep wardrobe in your bedroom?”

  “No. There’s a wardrobe, but it’s not very deep.”

  Then the doctor leaned over and touched the side of the neck of the man who called himself a workman, laying one finger under the earlobe. “Does that hurt?”

  “No.”

  The doctor withdrew his hand, sat up very straight again, and said, “No, it’s not serious. You’ll be well soon.”

  “What must I do?”

  “I’ll prepare a medicine for you to take. That will require several days. Meanwhile, every evening, as the sun begins to set, you’re going to stop your work in the shop for a moment.”

  “Where?”

  “In the workshop. And you’re going to sit down on the ground facing a low table on which is a sheet of white paper, a pen, and green ink, and you’re going to draw a tree.”

  “A tree?”

  “Yes.”

  “What tree?”

  “Any tree. It could be a sycamore, a plane, a linden, whatever. It could be a palm tree. Even a bush.”

  “The same tree every day?”

  “That’s not indispensable,” the doctor said, “but it would be preferable. Still, if you have a yen to change trees, there’s no reason not to.”

  “And when you give me the medicine, I’ll leave off drawing the tree?”

  “Ah, no. But you might draw a different one.”

  The man sighed. “All right,” he said. “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But how’s that? Don’t your patients pay you?”

  “In a sense they do.”

  “Green ink,” the man said, “good, good. And white paper. When should I come back?”

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “Should I bring the trees I draw?”

  “Yes,” said the doctor.

  “Good. Good-bye,” the man said, and left.

  The doctor closed his eyes. Not for long, for that morning a woman came with her son, and a man with lung disease, and a gardener who had cut his left hand with the pruning shears, and an ancient man wheeled in a handbarrow by two of his grandsons, and a boy who wanted to learn the names of the flowers that grow on the cold mountains of the North.

  When the sun was halfway across the sky, the doctor went to the kitchen and ate a red fruit and a crusty roll. And then he went into the garden and sat down at the edge of the pool, in the shadow of the great ferns growing among the stones.

  “Hi! Isn’t it too hot there?” Veevil called from her balcony.

  He looked at her and shook his head and said to himself a
gain that she was very beautiful, and she laughed and disappeared into her house. The doctor closed his eyes and thought about the pool. He opened them and saw that the girl was climbing the fence. She let herself drop down into his garden.

  “What do you mean it’s not hot?” Veevil said and sat down. “It’s extremely hot. And I want to ask you three things: Do you like sitting by the pool a lot? Do medicinal herbs grow here? Are there a lot of sick people?”

  “Yes, yes, and yes,” said the doctor.

  “Oh, come on, is that all?”

  “Didn’t I answer?”

  “Yes, but I don’t like answers. What I want is a conversation.”

  “Ah,” said he.

  “Or am I wasting your time?”

  “No, no. Don’t leave.”

  “Good, I’ll stay. So, why are there so many sick people?”

  “Because it’s easier to get sick than to look for one’s right place in the world.”

  “Explain, explain.”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “We keep adding needless things, false things to ourselves, till we can’t see ourselves and forget what our true shape is. And if we’ve forgotten what shape we are, how can we find the right place to be? And who dares pull away the falsities that are stuck to his eyelids, his fingernails, his heels? So then something goes wrong in the house and in the world, and we get sick.”

  “Ah,” said she. “Like the caloco fruit, that has five rinds.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we all have false things stuck to us?”

  “Almost all.”

  They sat silent a while.

  “What’s serious isn’t having them,” said the doctor. “What’s serious is loving them.”

  “What false things could I pull off myself?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know you.”

  After two days, the man who said he was a workman who had dealt in glasswares came back and showed the doctor two trees drawn in green ink on two sheets of white paper.

  “I think they’re snowtrees,” he said, “but I’m not sure. In any case they’re very old.”

  “Snowtrees live hundreds of years,” said the doctor, and bent over to touch the side of the sick man’s neck with one finger. “Does that hurt?”

  “No.”

  “In two days I’ll have your medicine ready. Is your bed in the center of the room?”

  “No, it’s in a corner. Why? Should I move it?”

  “No, but you’re to take away all the furniture between the bed and the door.”

  “Good,” the man said, and stood up. “Do I go on drawing trees?”

  “Yes.”

  That night there was a great storm and the doctor got almost no sleep, looking after the sick people who temporarily occupied several of the rooms of the house. One of them woke at daybreak, when the thunder and lightning had died down but it was raining hard, and told him that he felt he was going to die that night.

  “That’s good,” the doctor said. “Death too is necessary. And fitting. If it seems to you that you’re going to die, so it will be. Every one feels his death come, sees it, smells it, hears it.”

  “It’s raining,” the sick man said.

  “Yes, but that doesn’t matter to Lady Death.”

  “To me neither,” said the sick man. “What matters to me is having a lathe.”

  “You could send to ask your wife to buy you one.”

  “When it stops raining and the sun comes out,” said the man in bed, “I’m going to live on the banks of Singkaló where the earth is red and fertile. And I’m going to make myself a lathe.”

  “And Lady Death?”

  “Bah,” said the sick man. “She can have all that stuff, the house, the carriages, the children we had, the silverware in silverware chests.” And he went to sleep.

  The Emperor Chaloumell VII, fifteenth of the House of the Chaixis, felt bad on stormy days and worse on stormy nights, so next morning his royal garments were spotted with the blood that dripped from his nose, thick, dark, evil-smelling blood.

  “Don’t talk to me about doctors,” he gasped.

  Next day the sun came out, and the next day, and Veevil popped out on her bedroom balcony. The man who drew trees came at noon to get his medicine.

  “Yesterday I drew a broom-palm,” he said.

  “Broom-palms are handsome and majestic,” said the doctor.

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “I don’t like them much. But I drew one.”

  “You’re to take sixteen drops of this medicine, sixteen,” the doctor said, “when you wake up, before getting out of bed, each day for three days, and then come see me.”

  “Do I go on drawing trees?”

  “Yes.”

  The doctor was left alone, looking at the vine-wreathed door and thinking that if this man drew another broom-palm, and then one more, he might arrive at admitting what his real profession was. Rapid steps were heard, and the door was flung open with such force that it struck the wall like an explosion.

  “What have you done?” Veevil shouted. “What have you done?”

  “I haven’t done anything,” said the doctor.

  “Oh, no? You haven ‘t done anything? So why does Zigud-da come to see you, hah? Why?”

  “Oh, so he’s called Zigud-da. I didn’t know. He comes to see me because he’s sick, but what he’s got isn’t serious.”

  “Damn you,” said she, “damn you. Damn you and your mother and your grandmother and your children and your children’s children, damn you and I hope you die choking in your own blood.”

  “Veevil,” the doctor said.

  The girl leaned towards him and looked into his eyes: “Yes,” she said, “damn you, and I hope you die and I can dance on your body.”

  She straightened up, turned, and left leaving the door open. The doctor closed his eyes and looked within himself and breathed seventy times with his attention on the air passing in and out, each time deeper, each time more peaceful.

  That evening Veevil went to Nevviasoria Square and sat down among the people listening to a storyteller. The people listened, she did not. She sat very quiet, her eyes fixed on the man who was speaking and her hands crossed on her lap. She had been there a good while when somebody sat down next to her, leaning forward as if to hear better. One of Veevil’s hands moved and touched the ground, and when it returned to her lap, somebody’s hand was in that same place hiding a folded piece of paper.

  That evening Zigud-da drew in green ink another broom-palm, looked at it with a certain satisfaction, and lifted his hand to the side of his neck and pressed, asking himself, “Why’s he looking for a pain in my neck when what hurts is my belly?”

  That night the empress gave a party and the emperor stayed in his room and ate venison with murcula sauce and drank wine while thinking about the suitability of bringing the settlers of Sid-Ballein, who had had the insolence to rebel against an unimportant tax, to work on the renovation and enlargement of the palace. He would tell the foremen to treat them well, however. He wouldn’t forget that, the Emperor Chaloumell the Bald, who wanted his subjects to think well of him when he was dead.

  Two days later, Veevil went to the doctor’s house, but without running and slamming doors. She climbed over the dividing wall as usual and walked through the garden, which was growing dark, to the edge of the pool.

  “Where’s my friend Mr. Doctor?” she crooned.

  But no one heard her except an owl who couldn’t tell her, and she went to the kitchen, where a lamp was burning.

  “Good evening,” she said.

  “Good evening, Veevil. I thought you’d come, because in this bowl here, see? I’ve got currant pudding.”

  “I don’t like sweet things,” she said.

  “No?”

  “Not much.”

  The doctor handed her a wooden spoon and the girl sat down on a bench at the white table and ate currant pudding, and he ate dark bread, and neither of the two said anything fo
r a long time.

  “That man,” she said at last.

  The doctor didn’t answer. She waited while he chewed a piece of dark bread and then tore off another piece with his fingers, silent.

  “I wonder if you’re aware of what’s going on around you,” the girl said.

  “I am aware.”

  “That man is the captain of the Imperial Palace Guard.”

  “I know.”

  “You knew?”

  “No, but he drew another broom-palm, so that now I know.”

  “I don’t understand you, I really don’t understand you. You know so much, you guess so much, why do you stay hidden away here in this house making poultices and mixing cough syrup instead of making people do what you want?”

  The doctor smiled at her. “Oh, Veevil,” he said, “if I was in that business how could I know anything or see anything? See, not guess.”

  Again there was silence until she said, “The Chaixis dynasty has got to be done away with.”

  “Isn’t that what Zigud-da intends to do?”

  “Then you knew!”

  “No,” the doctor said.

  “But you said it!”

  “It wasn’t I that said it. Veevil and Zigud-da are saying it.”

  “Don’t say my name with that hyena’s.”

  “Is the currant pudding good?”

  “I don’t care about currant pudding! Yes, it’s good. Thanks. I want to talk about something different. I want to talk about Zigud-da’s death.”

  “Not the emperor’s death?”

  “Once the emperor’s down nobody will defend him, he can just be sent into exile.” She ate another spoonful of currant pudding. “We Borkhausis want a man on the throne who’ll look after the wellbeing of the people, not a monster of cowardice and egoism like Chaloumell. But the Imperial Guards have their eyes on the Golden Throne too. And the Guards are strong, they have money and arms, they have men in every strategic point of the Empire. If a man of the Imperial Guard comes to the throne, it will be a tragedy for the people.”

  “And if one of the Borkhausis does, it won’t?”