Kalpa Imperial

by LAngelica Gorodischer, Ursula K. Le Guin

  His clothes smeared with blood, trembling, stammering, all he could do was vomit near the corpse: till then he’d only seen respectable corpses, with powerful relatives, for whom he had to weep and mourn convincingly. But to his own surprise he recovered quickly, put horror aside, washed his face and hands, and scattered a bit of gold here and there among the croupiers and managers and waiters. He persuaded himself that the people of the casino would dispose of the body in gratitude for his gifts and to avoid a scandal; and he went home. He told himself he was safe.

  He didn’t sleep much that night. To tell the truth, he didn’t sleep at all. He tried to think, is what he did. But he was so full of alcohol and confusion that all he could bring to mind was the dead man’s face, the insult, the wounds, the horrified eyes of the owner of the casino. And he told himself that it was unimportant; he was a gentleman, obliged to kill to defend his honor, everybody knew him and would protect him, nothing would happen, the other man was a rustic, a nobody, with no connections, no influence.

  Now here is a little detail that doesn’t show up in the great chronicles and history books but only in a letter or a little-known account here and there, and that we’d even prefer to forget: Liel-Andranassder had, in fact, rigged the game. How could he not, when it was his principal source of income? Everybody knew he cheated, so that recently he’d only been able to play against out-of-towners, people who didn’t know him. And he knew perfectly well, how could he not know it, that he’d cheated the dead man. But so what? He was a notable person, member of an ancient, distinguished noble family; his grandfathers had been generals of the Empire; his grandmothers had been presented at court; he himself had once been invited to a palace reception and had seen, from a distance, the Emperor Sebbredel IV.

  Another detail, and this one does show up in the history books and folios of chronicles, the sagas and the popular songs: the dead man was not a nobody.

  It was near dawn when Liel-Andranassder heard steps in his anteroom. He jumped out of bed and got dressed in a hurry. He decided he ought to leave the city for a few days, go visit his parents in the country till the police stopped asking questions or the dead man’s relations stopped looking for him. That’s what he’d do, sure enough, he’d tell the servants to get the carriage ready right away.

  What happened next has been very badly misinterpreted. The legend has it that his loyal and devoted servants warned him of the danger he was in so that he could escape. My dear friends, when you hear people say that, hasten to deny it, to say that’s not quite how it was, and if they don’t believe you, tell them it was I who told you so. Liel-Andranassder did escape, that’s true, and did so thanks to one of his servants, that’s true: but it wasn’t loyalty or affection, but rancor, that moved the man to go that morning to his master’s bedroom and say, “Police. Looks like they’re coming here.”

  “The police?” he said, trying to make it look as if he wasn’t interested, and failing totally.

  “Yes. Yes sir, that’s it. The police. About a hundred of them. Sent by the Duke of Sandemoross.”

  “What?” he squealed.

  “Yes,” said the servant, happy to see this master who paid him poorly and treated him worse tied up in knots with fear, “and the Chief of the Imperial Police in person is in charge of them. It seems that last night somebody with a dagger killed the emperor’s stepbrother, the Governor of Abbel-Kammir, who was in the capital incognito.”

  And so Liel-Andranassder made his getaway. He sent the servant off, locked his door, thought of suicide a moment and ruled it out, not because he was a coward, you have to admit he wasn’t that, but because he had a wild hope of escape, and jumped out the window. And from here on the legends tell the truth: he had incredible good luck. It was just dawn. The Duke of Sandemoross, nephew of the empress, was entering the street door as the master of the house ran out the tradesmen’s gate behind the house.

  Five minutes later the duke, roaring with fury, ordered that the house be sacked and burned.

  Five minutes later Liel-Andranassder was walking slowly through the market place like an idle gentleman who’d got up unusually early and come out to see at what was for sale in the stalls. He stopped here and there, asked the price of a buckle, praised a length of velvet, examined some engravings, tested the edge of a dagger, and went on his way. He couldn’t have bought anything since he hadn’t a penny on him, but he needed to think, he wanted to gain time, to try to work out a plan, and above all he wanted to hear what was being said. He knew the market is the city’s soundbox. So he learned that they were looking for him, and thought again of suicide and again refused the thought. He went back across the market place and came to the river, and there a prostitute saved him.

  When the duke’s men got to the riverbank, not because they knew he was there but because they were looking everywhere, he was sleeping in a rather dirty bed aboard one of those barges where you can gamble and buy women, and the prostitute was combing her hair in front of the mirror and looking at the gold ring glittering on the middle finger of her left hand, more than satisfied by this unexpected client who hadn’t even wanted much from her. The barge was sailing upstream towards Durbbafal because its master didn’t like policemen and, finding that a search was going on throughout the city, came back to his boat almost on Liel-Andranassder’s heels without stopping to find out who or what the police were looking for. That day the search for the assassin was limited to the capital and its environs, and only late that night did the duke admit that the criminal might have left the city, and began to think of extending the hunt. And so when the Imperial Police reached Durbbafal, the assassin was no longer there.

  He was on his way south. He hadn’t chosen to hide in the South; as a Northerner he feared and despised those unknown provinces. But at the moment he had no choice. He had hopes, oh, yes, he still had real hopes of escaping. In an inn he had traded his elegant clothes for something to eat and a cotton tunic, and put on sandals instead of heeled shoes. He wasn’t walking alone, but he meant to abandon his companions whenever and wherever he could safely do so. And furthermore, for the moment at least, he was safe, because he wore pinned on his chest the badge of the Imperial Police, and walked among men who also wore the badge of the Imperial Police, under the command of a sergeant, a veteran of the Selbic Wars, who’d served twelve years in the troop of the Duke of Sandemoross.

  This too is on record in the chronicles: how Liel-Andranassder, the ruined nobleman, gambler and cheat, hunted as an assassin, got drunk in the inn with a couple of vagabonds, and how the police came on them along the road from Durbbafal to Laprac-Lennut and took them to the nearest police post. Hearing talk there of the assassination of the emperor’s stepbrother, and desperate to evade suspicion, he’d started talking too, telling with drunken enjoyment what he’d do to that assassin if he met him.

  “That fat fellow might be useful,” said the sergeant, who was an imbecile, and whose orders were to recruit as many men as he could to hunt the criminal throughout the Empire.

  They stuck the drunk’s head in a basin of cold water, let him sleep on a bench, and when he woke up gave him coffee and asked his name.

  “Andronessio,” he said.

  “Your papers.”

  “I haven’t got any,” he stammered.

  “You let them get stolen, stupid,” said the sergeant. “Make him out some temporary papers. You’re in the police now, got it?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And if you disobey an order or make a mistake, just once, I’ll have you stuck in jail for the rest of your life, which will be extremely short, got it?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I wonder if he’ll be any use,” the sergeant sighed, and paid him no more attention.

  So all of a sudden he was a policeman, had papers of identity, and was going away from the capital. Those were days of weariness, hunger, hardship; his feet were cut and bruised, he lost weight, his skin was chafed by the roughness of common clothing, his fingernails
got dirty, his hair long and wild. He missed his house, his money, his servants, his carriage, his soft bed, his polished floors, and gambling, and the vile society he knew so well. But they hadn’t caught him. Not yet.

  And so he marched for three months, sleeping in the rain, living on bits and scraps, helping arrest and punish poor devils, vagabonds, whores, thieves. Until in a town near the border of Brusta-Dzan province he realized that he had become somebody else.

  “How come they call you Fatty?” the innkeeper asked.

  “Me?”

  “Hey, Andronessio, it’s on account of you used to be fat,” one of the policemen said.

  The others laughed.

  “Yes,” said Andronessio, “guess I was. A long time ago.”

  And he got up to look at himself in a dim mirror near the stairs. The man looking back from the spotted quicksilver was not Liel-Andranassder. Nor was he Fatty. Nor was he Andronessio the policeman. Who would he be now? Who could he be?

  “I’m me,” he said to himself, but he still didn’t know who he was.

  Twelve leagues farther on, learning they’d been ordered to take another road that led northward and would bring them back to the capital, he ran off one night, barefoot, without the badge of the Imperial Police, leaving his mates asleep and the improvised camp without a guard. This time it was his own decision to go south. He was resolved to keep clear away from the emperor, the duke, the capital, the Imperial Police, and danger, and he didn’t have anywhere else to go. Death was waiting for him in the North as a murderer and now as a deserter. He knew it was waiting for him in the South too, but maybe there it wouldn’t take so long to come.

  There is a border between the North and the South, we all know that. But if in a lot of places the border is definite, visible, firmly under the control of the bureaucracy, in a lot of other place it isn’t. It’s as if it wasn’t there. So one day he crossed the border without knowing it. All he knew was that the weather kept getting hotter, that he was hungry and thirsty all the time, that his wounds and cuts had scarred over, and that he had very few memories left of houses with servants and soft beds, of men with knives at the exit of a gambling-den, of police and manhunts.

  One night he fell asleep more heavily than usual and when the sun rose he struggled to wake but could not. He went on sleeping and dreamed. I can’t tell you what he dreamed, but I imagine there were faces, many faces, and running blood. I imagine also that he was afraid, that he sweat cold and tossed and moaned, even cried out aloud, but could not wake.

  Many days later he opened his eyes and saw a straw roof. He fell asleep again and opened his eye again and saw a window. After sleeping dreamlessly some hours more he woke. It was night. Someone asked him his name.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  He was given water. Where did he come from? somebody asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and slept, and did not dream.

  Next morning he heard noises and voices before he opened his eyes; he stayed still, feeling his body heavy and aching. He was hungry.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “Good,” somebody said.

  A woman gave him food. During that day two or three men came and stood around looking at him and one of them talked to the woman. But it was a long time before he could get up and walk.

  The woman’s name was Rammsa. She had five children. Her eldest son was one of the men who had showed up the first day to look at him. “You drank poisonous water from the Tigers’ Well,” he said.

  “Ah. I didn’t know it was poisonous.”

  “How could anyone not know that?” asked Orgammbm, son of Rammsa. “How could anyone not know so many things? Your name, for instance. Have you forgotten it?”

  “No, it’s not that,” he said, “not that. I know I had many names.”

  “Many names,” said Orgammbm, and stopped, and stared at him.

  “Yes.”

  He ate and drank in the mud hut where Rammsa lived with her three youngest children. During the day he sat under the trees or watched the river run, and one day he asked Genna, Orgammbm’s youngest sister, to teach him to braid leather, because he wanted to make himself sandals.

  “Women don’t braid leather,” Genna said, looking at him wonderingly, “that’s men’s work.”

  He laughed because Genna wasn’t a woman but a child who scarcely reached his shoulder, and she said she’d call one of her brothers to teach him.

  “And what do women do, Genna?” he asked, before she’d gone far.

  She turned around and stood looking at him in silence, as if asking herself whether or not to answer him. Finally she decided it was worth the trouble, and she began to sing softly:

  The world is nothing and nothing

  You have to sit and think

  Shut your eyes and think

  Hold out your hand and think

  Breathe deep and think

  Move your feet and think

  And then the world is nothing and is

  The kitchen of your house

  “And what does that mean?” he asked.

  “What it means,” said Genna, and went to find her brother.

  He learned to braid leather and made himself two pair of sandals and a belt, which he showed to Orgammbm. Rammsa’s eldest son told him that they were well made, almost as if by a craftsman; and showed them to his mother, saying, “He says he remembers having many names but doesn’t know his name.”

  Rammsa looked at the two young men sitting on her house-mat, her son who was like all men, a bit stupid, very vulnerable, and very valiant, and the other, the stranger, who was not like all men. She had said, “Give him to me, he’ll live,” when the men had brought him in dying, struggling, convulsing, lips swollen, gasping for breath, nose and mouth full of dried blood. And she, who had washed him and cared for him, had forced him to swallow green mandremillia seeds and made him lie face down so that he wouldn’t choke and had cleaned up the vomit and the blood, she was ready to smile, to give hopeful approval, to speak. But because she had suffered, had had a hard life and learned prudence, she said only, “Good,” and looked out the window at the river. “Good,” she said again, “it might or might not mean anything. We don’t even know where he comes from. And he doesn’t know, either, does he?”

  He did remember where he came from, of course he did, though sometimes it seemed to him that these memories were dreams born of the poison, or belonged to somebody else; but as he was becoming prudent, like Rammsa, he said, “That’s it. I don’t know. I don’t know where I come from or who I am.”

  “No,” said Rammsa, “that’s foolishness. Everybody is who he is.”

  “But the world is nothing and nothing,” he said, not knowing why he said it, only because he thought that what the mother had said was a good way to end the daughter’s song.

  Rammsa started, she who was always so calm. “Who told you that?”

  “Genna, Rammsa’s daughter.”

  Nobody said anything more. Orgammbm lowered his eyes and looked again at the sandals and belt, and Rammsa did nothing: she just sat there, serene, with them. And in the quiet and silence he thought how almost always Rammsa seemed to be doing nothing, but that might not be so, for an idle or useless woman couldn’t be as important as he felt her to be.

  A few days later they told him to go. They didn’t kick him out, but told him he had to go. At that moment, with his burden of memories, his own or somebody else’s, it occurred to him that the Imperial Police were coming and the inhabitants of the city, town, whatever this was he was living in, were trying to save him. If he’d gone on being the man who fled the capital after stabbing the emperor’s stepbrother to death, he surely would have thought differently: that they hated him, were driving him away, resented him because in the convalescent wanderer they’d guessed the Northerner used to luxuries and conveniences they’d never known. But even if he no longer was that man, he kept some trace of him, and so he did think about danger. Perhaps Ramm
sa saw it in his eyes, for she smiled and said, “Nothing bad is going to happen to you, son, unless you want it to. But you’re going to have to go.”

  His alarm passed. But not because Rammsa said that, not because he realized that his pursuers were far away, but because his talk with the woman had convinced him that the things he’d considered important weren’t so important, and that the empty place he’d always filled up with all the stuff he had valued so much was indeed empty, empty and open, waiting for what was to come to fill its positions, its ranks, waiting for clear light to fall on clear shapes, and clear spaces to waken clear echoes.

  “Why?” he asked the woman.

  “Because that is how it is,” she said, “and we have to do a thing so that it can be as it is. Because we were made to know, not to submit.”

  And she spoke with such haughty certainty and finality that he could ask no more.

  He said nothing and set to shaping a walking stick, but Rammsa’s response had made him think of the song sung him by Genna, the child not as tall as his shoulder, and so he worked away without paying much heed to what he was doing, hoping to see or hear the little girl. Orgammbm came by instead, with one of his younger brothers.

  “You’re going to need a knife,” he said, offering him one with a broad, strong blade and an antler haft.

  Perhaps he felt once more how the flesh of the man had given to the knife, there in the cobbled street near the door of the gaming house. Or perhaps not, perhaps he felt nothing of the sort and what happened was because the voices of the earth and water are so strong in the South that even a man coming from luxury and corruption can hear them. I don’t know, and there’s nobody who can find out for me; it’s not in words, written or sung, and nobody can tell us. I only know that he answered, “No. I don’t want a knife. I don’t want weapons.”