Kalpa Imperial

by LAngelica Gorodischer, Ursula K. Le Guin

  “No, of course it won’t, how could you think so? The Guards are despotic, rigid, ambitious, almost worse than the Chaixis. We’re going to be just, we’re going to bring the people justice and freedom.”

  “Those are two very beautiful words, Veevil. And big words. Big enough that they shouldn’t leave room for a man’s death.”

  “Zigud-da has to die,” she said. “Is he very ill?”

  “No.”

  “Then something has to be done to make him get very ill and die. If we kill him, the Imperial Guards will suspect us and come after us and kill us like cockroaches. Zigud-da has to die, don’t you see that? We have to keep these brainless, remorseless brutes in uniform from the path to the throne. And the captain’s right in the middle of that path.”

  “He’s nearly cured,” said the doctor.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. He drew the seeds of the broom-palm at the foot of the trunk. And he jumped when I put my finger on the side of his neck and pressed, here.”

  “He has to die. He has to get sick and die,” the girl said.

  “No.”

  “But don’t you see that this man is evil?”

  “He may be.”

  “Don’t doctors fight against evil? Don’t they want to do good?”

  “Yes.”

  “So? What does he have to draw, or think, or eat, that will make him ill?”

  “My teacher taught me many things,” the doctor said. “But the day I left my house to go live in his, that day I learned to wash the pots and pans in the kitchen and how to tell a spider who’s going to lay eggs from a spider going hunting.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with Zigud-da’s death.”

  “Yes, you do, Veevil. With a very little effort, you do see. Even if maybe you don’t want to see it.”

  “If Zigud-da gets sick and dies, I’ll leave my house and come to yours forever.”

  The doctor felt a piercing pain in his chest.

  “I can learn to wash pots and pans,” she said, “and all about spiders and herbs. And I can help you with your patients and keep you company and keep the house clean and give you lovely strong healthy children.”

  “And what would the two of us talk about on winter nights, Veevil, when we were alone, in the lamp light, in the kitchen?”

  “Does that mean you won’t make him get sick and die?”

  “I don’t know,” the doctor said.

  She stood up and looked at the clay bowl. She reached out, took the wooden spoon, and buried it in the thick, shiny pudding.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said, “if you’ll think about everything I said.”

  “Yes.”

  The old doctor, who had been alone all his life, as other men with other jobs are alone all their lives, poets, twentiers, storytellers—the old doctor slept alone that night in his narrow bed, a restless and unquiet sleep. Twice he woke for no reason, and twice got up and went to look at his patients. It seemed to him, while he was putting a pitcher of fresh water by the bedside of one of them, a boy with an authoritarian father and a throat condition, it seemed to him that Veevil had not left but was still there with him in the white house.

  But the girl was in fact off in an abandoned warehouse near the river, speaking low and fast, surrounded by people listening to her; and when she left there very late, almost at daybreak, she had hidden in a pocket of her coat a little silver box in which was a fine white powder.

  Since the emperor loved his palace, that morning he sent for the captain of the Imperial Guard and held a long conversation with him.

  “If His Imperial Majesty approves,” said Zigud-da, “we shall set off this afternoon. We shall camp at Tusugga and make a surprise attack on Sid-Ballein tomorrow at noon when the inhabitants are eating or resting.”

  The emperor approved. Zigud-da gave orders to his men, then left the palace and went to the house in Whiterose Street. He had to wait under the vines because, in the room with the mat-covered stone floor, the doctor was talking with someone. What the captain of the Guard thought as he waited is something no one will ever know. But the probability is that he was impatient; and since he was no longer ill, it’s also probable that he had forgotten about the broom-palms and instead of the green leaves swaying in the wind and shining in the sun he remembered a game he used to play as a child in the dusty streets of Eriamod or the skills he’d had to demonstrate to be admitted into the Imperial Guard. What we do know is that when a fat woman came out of the room, wobbling over the flagstones with unsteady steps, he went on waiting for the doctor to call him, and hearing nothing for a long while, approached the door and went in.

  “Good day,” said the doctor.

  “Good day,” and he sat down.

  “You’re not sick any more.”

  “No,” Zigud-da said, “I don’t have any pain here and the cold burning doesn’t come up from my stomach.”

  As the doctor said nothing, the captain of the Imperial Guard went on: “What should I do now? Should I go on drawing trees?”

  “Would you like to?”

  “No. It takes too much time. And later today I have to do some traveling.”

  “No more sketches, then. And your bedroom furniture can go back where it was. Don’t take any more of the medicine I gave you. What you can do is look closely at the trees you see along the way as you travel. And for three days, take this other medicine I’ve prepared for you.”

  The doctor got up, left the captain alone, and went to a room that opened on the courtyard of the fountain, facing the rooms where his patients were. There he chose a flask, went out and recrossed the courtyard. But before he came to the vine-wreathed arcade , the sunlight shone on the glass flask and the liquid in it, and the doctor stopped. For a moment he felt again the sharp pain he felt last night in the kitchen facing Veevil. He clenched his hand on the flask, went into the room and sat down on the mat. He said to the man who was waiting there, “No, don’t take anything. It will be better.”

  “But what if I get sick again?”

  “That is possible. All of us could take ill at any moment. All the same I think that you won’t get sick again for a long time; there are other ways of preventing the illness you had. While you’re traveling you’ll feel well, and when you come back you’re going to buy some sessely seeds, dry them in the sun, grind them and keep them in a cool dry place, and use them once a month to season your food.”

  The man stood up. “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Good. What do I owe you?”

  “At the moment, nothing. If it ever occurs to you that you’re in my debt, then you’ll know what to bring me.”

  “And if it doesn’t occur to me?”

  “Then we’ll see,” said the doctor.

  “Goodbye,” said Captain Zigud-da, and left.

  Perhaps the story of the man who lived in a house on Whiterose Street with the door always ajar, which people said used to be a brothel and a pilgrims’ inn, and which had a buried treasure hidden in the courtyard, ought to end here. I ask myself if that would not be the most fitting. But the most fitting isn’t always what we like best, and sometimes we storytellers find it hard to finish, to be done with a story. So I’ll go on and tell you that the old doctor buried in the garden, in a deep hole, the flask that should have held a clear transparent liquid and which held instead a thick liquid full of sediment. And that same night he told Veevil two things: that what is called evil is also necessary, and that the world is immensely rich and varied yet is one and the same because the most disparate things are brothers and the things farthest apart are equivalent. What the girl replied to this doesn’t matter; she left, and never jumped over the garden wall again.

  I’ll also tell you that Chaloumell the Bald died soon after, passing from one of his fainting fits to death with only a shudder and a cry, but that the Chaixis dynasty didn’t end with him. His eldest son ascended to the throne, Cheirantes III, known to his
tory by the disrespectful nickname Mad Horse, who married the second daughter of the Duke of N’Cevvilea but almost immediately took as his concubine one of the girls from Sid-Ballein who was working on the new additions to the palace. This was the pretext for an uprising of the Imperial Guard, who declared it unfitting that a prisoner whom they had brought as a slave from afar should be given a high position at court. Mad Horse pretended to be cowed by the rebellion, promised to surrender, and asked for a secret meeting with the ringleaders to plead for his life. The meeting was to be in a pavilion near the palace, but none of the leaders of the uprising got that far. They fell into a deep pit dug in the woods surrounding the pavilion built by the second Chaixis emperor for one of his mistresses, and the brilliant Lord of the Golden Throne entertained himself by cutting their throats until his arm got tired, and left the rest there in the pit to die of hunger and thirst. The girl from Sid-Ballein bore the emperor the only son he had, since the empress never conceived, some said because she was barren, others, because the emperor never lay with her. And this only son of the Mad Horse was the Emperor Cheanoth I, whom the Empire will not soon forget, for of all the wise, just men who have sat on the Golden Throne, he was one of the best.

  And one day that boy who wanted to learn the names of the flowers that grow in the cold mountains of the North came back to the house in Whiterose Street, and didn’t leave it again, but stayed as apprentice. And when his master died, he, being then a man grown, went on practicing medicine and watching the world, sitting in the evening beside the pool that reflected the treasure buried in the courtyard and the limitless boundaries of the house.

  Basic Weapons

  The storyteller said: But if we want to understand, really understand, the history of the Emperor Horhórides III, seventh ruler of the House of the Jénningses, we must pause to recall that the years he lived in were hardly peaceful ones. All the Jénningses emperors had turbulent souls and contorted minds, and turbulent and contorted was the age when they occupied the Golden Throne. Horhórides III’s period was less troubled, perhaps, but even more extravagant. There was no war, no famine, no plague: but vice flourished, as did smuggling, assassination, greed, hypocrisy, and the arts of the hideous. In short, there was no happiness, no innocence. Maybe the plague would have been preferable. And to demonstrate this, I leave the emperor for a little while to tell you a brief story; for a good story saves long explanations, and I, who have told so many, assure you that this is a good one.

  Master Bramaltariq had seventeen horses, nine wives, and three bearskin cloaks, one dyed green, one purple, and one blue. In the wretched alley called The Eagle was a shop of curiosities, and curiosities was certainly the word for them, whose owner was named Drondlann: he had a round bald head, a short neck, long powerful arms, and a massive body without an ounce of fat on it. He had no legs, but an ingenious harness attached two wheels to him, which he pushed with his arms, thus propelling himself quickly and silently. Nobody knew how he had lost his legs: if in a fight, or an accident, or if he’d been born so.

  When Master Bramaltariq passed through the High Street with his cortege, Drondlann gave a push to his wheels and left his den to go hide among the trees bordering the avenue and watch. Master Bramaltariq’s wives were very white and very plump, and sat on gilt pillows with colored tassels. He hired out his stallions to country folk who had only mares; he kept the colts. He lived in a big stone house built in the middle of a lake of black water; it had verandas of carved wood, mirrors in the ceilings, curtains in the windows, and torch-lit hidey-holes mined with traps. Drondlann had no horses nor bearskin cloaks; all he had was the curiosity shop and his two wheels and a plant of hatred in his belly which he watered carefully every day. He watched Master Bramaltariq go by with his wives and servants, and the plant thrust its flowers into his throat and wrists. He told himself that he was as good a man as that soft fatty, and better, recalling how when he made a lucky sale, he’d go find a certain dark, thin, weatherbeaten prostitute, a bit of scum from the dregs of the slums, who’d leave next morning with a small share of the money and two bruised furrows in her thighs.

  Nobody knew anything for sure about where Drondlann got his merchandise. But it was known that it was Grugroul who brought him the blond boy. Around then the sale of dwarfs had fallen off; they were a drug on the market when, only two seasons back, everybody was mad to have at least one dwarf chained at the street door or in a cage hung from the drawing room ceiling. About the time Master Bramaltariq acquired his ninth wife, Drondlann began to stop doing business with the people who came to Eagle Alley to sell dwarfs.

  “I don’t want dwarfs,” he told them, “they’re not selling.”

  “Giants,” one of these disappointed salesmen proposed, “giants, huh? What do you think? If dwarfs aren’t selling, giants will, huh? Because a giant’s the opposite of a dwarf, right, huh?”

  Drondlann didn’t kick the stupid man out the door, though he considered it carefully and thoroughly, as he considered everything.

  “No,” he said finally, “no, no giants. Out. Out of here, and don’t come back. Unless,” and he smiled, “unless you bring me something really out of the ordinary.”

  The cripple of Eagle Alley was hoping that somebody would bring him something rare enough to justify the long trip to the bridge that ran from the lakeshore to the stone house on the islet, so that he could offer it to Master Bramaltariq. He wanted to hear the stallions neighing and see the plump women reclining on wrinkled silken carpets. He wanted to smell the incense burning in niches and look up to see his own reflection in the mirrored ceilings. He wanted to look at the black lake from the house, roll along the polished floors, spy, and water the plant in his belly.

  The salesman told somebody what the dealer wanted, and that somebody told another somebody, and so on until it got to Grugroul.

  A few days later a winged fetus was brought to Eagle Alley. It was unfortunately dead. But Drondlann paid a few coins for it and promptly, before it began to rot, sold it to a man in a hood who said he wanted it for his master, a sufficiently dubious claim. Drondlann assured him that since the creature had a leathery skin it would last a good while. The hooded man never came back. Then a six-legged dragon was brought to him. He could neither sell it nor feed it. The animal refused rats, tender shoots, birds, mushrooms, spiders, and hot coals, and so died of starvation. The dealer thought that he’d been most unwise not to ask the seller what six-legged dragons ate, having simply assumed that it ate what four-legged ones did. Another day he was offered a white snake with gills and antennae, but, recalling the dragon, he refused it. He bought a hermaphrodite and two children without ears or eyes and sold all three at a good price, even though one of the kids did nothing but moan and sob, but sad to say, there are people who like things like that. He also bought a blond dragonfly that lived on filth and excrement. He clipped her fore-wings to prevent her escaping and so let her loose in the shop much of the time. He tried to have sex with her and she offered no resistance, but when he saw what her belly ended in between the hindmost legs, he withdrew, feeling rather sick. She did not appear to be offended. She wasn’t easy to sell, but he didn’t worry about it since not only did it cost nothing to feed her but she disposed of all kinds of filth and nasty stuff, and he had a kind of fondness for her. In the end he put her at half price, a real steal for anybody who wanted a blond dragonfly in the house, and The Riuder of the Water Pyramid bought her, conveniently preventing people from saying Drondlann had unsaleable items in his shop. And so with other things, nothing extraordinary, nothing he could go offer at the house on the lake, till the day Grugroul came with the boy. The owner of the curiosity shop thought the boy belonged to the salesman and didn’t look at him.

  “I’ll sell him to you,” Grugroul said.

  Drondlann didn’t bother to turn his head; he was astute enough to have learned not to examine the merchandise, whatever it might be. If there was nothing special about the boy, as he thought, it wasn’t worth
the trouble to twist his neck, and if there was, to show interest might be counterproductive.

  “Not interested,” he said.

  Grugroul smiled. “You’re going to miss something exceptional,” he said.

  So then the merchant of Eagle Alley turned his head slowly, very slowly, and looked at the merchandise. He shrugged. “Why would I want that?”

  For he saw a boy, just a boy—complete, nothing missing, nothing added. Blond, two bright eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, teeth, two arms, two hands, body, two legs, two feet. Drondlann turned his back and began to clean the cages.

  “He doesn’t talk,” Grugroul said.

  “Big deal.”

  He opened the door of the cage that held the giant bat that a young scholar who didn’t wish to give his name had promised to come for tomorrow, and took out the bowl to change the water.

  “He knows how to dance,” Grugroul persisted.

  Now this did surprise the dealer. The word echoed in his head: dance, dance.

  “Dance,” he repeated. “What’s that?”

  He hadn’t forgotten his caution; but he had, now and then, encountered and sold an article that seemed commonplace but wasn’t. The Dame of the Hill, for instance, widow of The Jungaï of the Silos, had gone mad, or so it was said though nobody was sure, after keeping in her house for a month an old man she’d bought from him to feed her birds. Since the old man didn’t live at the same time as the Dame but a few minutes ahead of her, he answered her questions before she asked them, or talked about things that began happening as he was finishing his sentence. And Adanssanto of the Tunnels had killed his adopted son, a newborn infant that Drondlann had fetched from the marshes of the South, because he claimed the infant produced dreams. Or a dream. At any rate he was declared not guilty, because the infant came, after all, from the South. But the whole affair had been a bother and a waste of time, and Adanssanto of the Tunnels had never fully recovered.

  “What’s dancing?” he repeated in surprise, holding the dirty water dish in his hand.