The Universe of Things

by Gwyneth Jones

  “You have chosen.”

  “Reluctantly, yes,” said the lady. “It was delicate. A choice of harms: a little could have changed it. But I believe, as you perhaps do not, that the people’s minds are with me when I debate, just as our troubled minds have been with Canditinggi these past days. So be it then. It is generally better not to fight against fate.”

  Silk whispered as she rose, and with a slight bow she left me. She was gone before I realized I ought to thank her. In one small space of time I had been given everything I asked from Canditinggi. Recognition from a Dapur lady, inside knowledge of the debate — and the prince I had wanted for Timur. But it was too late now.

  Derveet invited me to walk with her up to Candi Daulat. It was a rare afternoon without rain. We climbed through the glistening trees and vines, on the remains of the old road: steep, engineered curves from another time. The sky above the hilltop was soft, and water vapor rose from the ground in thin white veils. We sat on slabs of fallen sculpture by the squat black shrine and looked down on Canditinggi.

  “It’s strange,” I said, “but I have never wanted to be a woman.”

  “Why should you?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Women are not better than men. Only different.”

  I answered that platitude as it deserved — not at all, and she grinned lazily.

  “You can’t deny it was Woman to whom God turned for help, at the renewal of the world.” I leaned back and craned upwards to where this transaction was represented in stone: the Mother of Life dancing on the newborn mountaintops, receiving Divinity. “There is no man in that picture,” I pointed out.

  “But it is man then who comes to God face to face, a difficult thing for any woman to do. Dealing with the Divine as a business partner tends to get in the way.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of being human. Of humility.”

  Days had passed, and we had all begun to recover from that strange, frightening wave of depression. No one spoke of it. No announcement had been made: the Dapur does everything slowly. But Derveet and I knew it was all over. Silently, our abstract conversation acknowledged her defeat.

  Candi Daulat means temple of the sovereigns; these fallen stones were carved all over with the eagle insignia of the vanished Garudas. It was not strictly safe to be here; we might be spotted coming or going. The shrine had few visitors, even up in the defiant mountains.

  “Shall we go back?”

  Derveet stood. She touched carved stone ruefully and touched her brow, half ashamed of the sentimental gesture. I saw suddenly how young she was, only a little older than myself. And how very much alone. She caught my glance; I quickly looked away.

  Someone was coming up the road. It was Annet, the aneh woman, in her black dusty robes. No greeting.

  “They told me I’d find you here,” she said, ignoring me. “Well, I’ve voted, finally. It will be announced tomorrow. Jagdana discovered Ida Sadia has piles. Gamartha counted up and decided the Bangau only have sixty-three generations, not a hundred and twenty after all. Timur reluctantly yielded to social pressure; so we are now unanimous. You’d better give me some more of that foul paper money. I have to pay up at the hotel, and I’ve nothing left.”

  They went. I stayed. So Gusti Ketut Siamang was now prince of Timur. How surprised Annet would have been, if she had looked back, to see the Timurese, the collaborator, on his knees and crying for the poor Peninsula.

  I was also crying for myself. Canditinggi and Derveet had taken from me my dream of the shining Rulers, and I would never get it back. I would have to see the work-camps now, the “state plantations,” the deprivation, and all the casual daily brutality. I had to see the contempt of that “education,” which simply snipped out the words I must not know — parasites, aliens. And there was no dream to replace the lost dream: only the Peninsula, with all its ugly faults. The Debate had proved to me that the “different road” was real, but what was the use of it? What was the use of mind speaking to mind if the only message was defeat, defeat, defeat…?

  I swallowed tears, and sat up suddenly. I thought: he is not elected yet. Not until the announcement.

  I don’t know when I had guessed Derveet’s secret. Presumably after she had changed my mind, because it would hardly have mattered to me before. There was something uncanny about that dark outcast lady. Her authority over the bandits, and her astounding arrogance on the matter of this election. Once, Durjana, in a heated moment, had jumped up and shouted at her “Only your name!” — and sat down instantly, blushing like a rose. The name that kept the knives sheathed could not be “aneh.” She might have been born a Jagdanan noble, or even a minor royal. But Timurese, criminal or not, do not curtsey to Jagdana. Only one family ever united the Peninsula. Only one name makes us all bow.

  I had heard the story that somewhere in the wilds a Garuda survived: a crippled Garuda, cast out in the darkness. I had imagined, like the rest of my world, that this was a sort of allegory of dissent. I stayed on the hilltop for some time, thinking. It seemed to me absolutely clear that I must be the one to tell the secret. The aneh knew Derveet’s family name, and so did the bandits. Probably some part of the Jagdana delegation knew her too. But the aneh were powerless, the bandits corrupt, and Jagdana notoriously too “restrained” to take direct action over anything. I could give Derveet another vote — powerful and not at all restrained. The people who gave me birth had an old, old, quarrel with Garuda of the South. Obviously they had not been trusted. I could see why not, between Koperasi spies and our own, home-grown traditions of treachery. But I must take the risk. It was considerable (this was what kept me on the hilltop); but for me, I believed, not for Derveet. In Gamartha feudal obligations stand above love or hate. In Gamartha, a needless male is an animal to be slaughtered.

  I went down into town, under cover of a new rainstorm and the growing darkness. I went to the street I had never dared to visit. I was sure they wouldn’t do anything to me in Canditinggi. I was still frightened and wished I was staying in a brighter, more populous area… Various guards challenged me, I identified myself, and they allowed me to pass. Names are magic, you see. Eventually I spoke to an assistant of one of the delegates, a lady who had once been a distant cousin of mine. I told her what I knew or surmised and suggested Gamartha ought to respect the preference of the sovereign family. There was a pause.

  In silence a hand I did not see pushed from under the lady’s curtains a knife in a case decorated with the device of my family; defaced, because we are all dead. I left it there. No one touched me.

  I went back to the inn and slept like a baby.

  The next morning it transpired that there would be a delay: a final consultation. I sat in a coffee shop, shaken and yet quite calm, while around me boys and men whispered nervously. My Koperasi saw me through the door and came in. He pretended to check the required notices above my head and quietly told me to get out of my inn as there was a police action coming off. Hunting big game. Get out of town, now. Don’t look back.

  I went into the street, walking like a puppet. Everything seemed deathly still, even the sun in the sky. It occurred to me that Durjana the bandit was worth more trust than I. I went to Annet — not knowing what else to do, to the medium class hotel the Jagdanans had put her in, in their street. The courtyard gates were open. Derveet was there. Annet was leaving. There was a chair on the ground, the chair-boys were taking out some meager bundles: Snake and Buffalo as busily stowing the bundles back in.

  “Extra pay for bags. Extra pay!”

  “Lady walk. You carry luggage.”

  “Lady no walk. Lady can’t walk. Extra pay!”

  As I arrived Annet was saying in her loud harsh voice, “It’s a farce. I won’t stay another hour.” Derveet put out her hand and spoke, quietly. Annet turned, with a sour, exasperated, loving face, and they embraced. I saw that I’d been right in my surmise that the two were lovers; and I envied them, although their love was crippled, outside the Da
pur — because I shall never love another man. I have poisoned that spring.

  I realized I had never seen Derveet in town before.

  “Madam —”

  “Endang. Why… What’s the matter?”

  “The Koperasi know.”

  “Know? Know what?”

  “I am from the North, originally.”

  She nodded, with a puzzled smile; she had known my secret. It wasn’t important.

  “I am an outcast, but last night I went to Gamartha street. I told someone I believed a living Garuda was present at the debate and did not favor Gusti Ketut. I thought it might make a difference.”

  She stared, a frozen moment.

  “But now the Koperasi mean to raid our inn, looking for big game. I swear Gamartha did not betray you. I must have been followed.”

  Not necessarily.

  “It’s odd,” she said, “to tell tales like that and then come and apologize for it. But thank you anyway.” Her voice was gentle as ever. Her eyes were black, so I could see no iris. She’d already forgotten me, dismissed me: she was calculating her next move, her chances of escape. I would have liked to die.

  Then there was a commotion in the street behind us. A line of chairs stopped. The ladies descended, veiled and bearing their silver chains, surrounded by high caste boys in green and mauve Gamarthan livery. The boys had a flower ball woven of frangipani petals, they were tossing it from hand to hand to sweeten the air. The robes and liveries drew level with us, across the street. As they did so, a boy let the toy slip and it tumbled into the roadway. The Gamarthan ladies did not raise a single eye, or a single veil, but they all stooped together, as if reaching for it. Like a field of grain under the wind they went down, they bowed, fluidly, until their graceful bare hands touched the ground.

  One of the boys ran out and picked up the flowers. Gamartha’s delegation rose, walked on, and turned into Jagdana’s gate. Garuda, silently acknowledged by her loyal enemies, stood on the dirty cobbles blinking like a cat surprised by sunlight.

  It was not twelve hours since I had spoken to my cousin. I understood that I, and my contacts, had probably been watched all the time. My mouth was suddenly dry: Gamartha never forgets. Derveet turned back to me with a crooked smile.

  “My apologies,” she said, “to Endang, and Gamartha. You must have been followed. Things are not so bad, after all. Never quite so bad as they might be.”

  That was the end. Annet took her friend’s arm and drew her into the gateway. The chairboys had stopped arguing. They stood together with Snake and Buffalo, like a shield, and stared at me until I walked away. I did not see Derveet again. I left the inn that same hour, and then Canditinggi. I heard afterwards that the “big police action” achieved nothing except to put the so-called fifth vote into disarray. A day or two later an unidentifiable delegation guard-boy was found dead, with the colors torn from his livery. “Been followed” was after all a euphemism, a Peninsulan courtesy. Our Rulers’ servants are everywhere, even in the ranks of proud Gamartha. What happened in the closed courtyards I do not know. When the announcement eventually came, Ida Bagus Sadia had been elected prince.

  But Derveet was wrong. Things are bad. Things are so bad, these days, that it is hard to see how worse can be possible. Shortly after the Accession, the disappointed family of the infant Bangau invited their former daughter for a visit, with her son the prince-elect. During this visit it seems the elder boys of the family entered Sadia’s room in the middle of the night. They gagged him, tied him to a bedpost and castrated and excised him, cauterizing the wounds with a hot iron so they should not be guilty of murdering a guest. He was seventeen years old. He recovered, but he killed himself as soon as he was able use a knife. In punishment for this crime the Bangau lost the last of their independent territory to the plantations. The displaced population was moved into camps, in the usual way. The Bangau have vanished, like the Garudas and so many others; and Gusti Ketut Siamang is our prince. There is no sign as yet of any improvement in Timur’s status. I believe the Peninsula is doomed. I believe we have all gone mad, and nothing can save us. I have no more dreams of the “different road,” of the tree growing slowly, slowly. It is no use. The forest is on fire, and as far as I can see that precious new growth burns just like any other wood.

  As for Derveet, she is gone. I think the fate of Ida Bagus Sadia, the good young man, broke her at last, destroyed her patience and her strength. I heard a few months after the Bangau tragedy that Buffalo boy was dead, killed in a Koperasi raid on illegal hill-crop farming. Derveet may have been killed there too. Or she may still live, an ogre among the rest. There is a story of a new bandit leader: very clever, very savage, who is terrorizing the Koperasi down south. I don’t know. Perhaps it hardly matters. But when I hear of that leader dead, as I surely will one day soon, I will mourn the last of the Garudas, the end of our hope.

  November 1985

  The Thief, the Princess,

  and the Cartesian Circle

  Once upon a time there was a princess who was quite pretty and fairly intelligent, and when the time came to marry her off, the royal family didn’t worry about it too much.

  One day the princess came down to breakfast and found the king, for a wonder, still sitting over his toast and marmalade. He was a workaholic monarch and was generally long gone to his dispatch boxes by the time she appeared. As she sat down she observed that he was pulling faces at her royal mother; then he got up and slunk out of the room.

  “Dear,” said her mother. “I want us to have a little talk.”

  The princess pointed distantly at a cereal packet and took a bowl from Perkins, the breakfast maid. “What is it mother?”

  “Darling, you’re nearly twenty now.”

  “So what, mother?”

  The king had no male heir. The princess must marry a suitable prince who would rule the kingdom. She knew this, everybody knew this. But had there ever been such a mutinous and contrary child? The best education, the best of everything indeed, had been showered on this only daughter — skiing holidays, beautiful clothes, jewelry, a tv in her bedroom — all to no avail. One could accept some little outbursts of rebellion from a princess nowadays, but this one was just shockingly self-willed. The interview at the breakfast table ended in tears, and not the princess’s tears either: she never cried.

  “She says such cruel things,” sobbed her mother, having taken refuge in her husband’s office. “And it’s so depressing, to know that one’s servants pity one.”

  The king stomped to and fro beside the royal windows that opened onto the balcony swathed in velvet, from which a courtier should already have announced the princess’s betrothal plans. “She looks all right,” he remarked at last in a puzzled voice. He could not understand how his stony-hearted and (to be honest) frightening child could look so much like other peoples’ children. It would be so much easier if there was a dragon in the case, or a curse, or a straightforward enchantment. It would be bliss, come to think of it, if she were sent to sleep for a hundred years.

  Up in her bedroom, princess Jennifer laid out the vegetable knife, the lint dressings, the antiseptic spray. She knelt on the carpet in front of them and bared the white inner surface of her forearm.

  Cut.

  The king and the queen were in the parlor, talking about what the neighbors had to say.

  Cut.

  “We could offer her hand to the prince who can make her smile?”

  “She often smiles.”

  The king shivered a little. It was not a nice thing, when the princess smiled.

  Cut.

  “It’s no use my dear,” sighed the queen. “She’s a thoroughly unpleasant young woman, and we could wait till doomsday to get rid of her if we try the ‘whoever breaks this spell’ ploy. We must have a legitimate succession, but I’m sincerely sorry for the young man who takes her on, whoever he may be. Even though she is my daughter and I try to love her. She’ll break him; she’ll destroy him. Her sort of ‘enchantment�
�� isn’t supposed to be catching. But it is.”

  The king didn’t quite follow, but he caught the most hopeful point. His expression brightened. “You think she will marry?”

  “She’s never shown any sign of wanting to do anything else.”

  Cut.

  Pain and blood. The blood dripped into a bowl of white plastic, an open carrier bag stretched over a coat-hanger. The princess let it run down until she began to feel dizzy. She sprayed the cuts and dressed her arm, took the bag, and poured blood down the toilet. It looked like her period. She flushed it away and rinsed the bag in the basin.

  The princess sat on her royal bed and stared at the rich white silk coverlet, the real gold swan-necks that held up the monogrammed royal headboard, the pillow edged with finest lace. The queen and the king couldn’t see this bedroom. They couldn’t see themselves. Princess Jennifer was beginning to be afraid for them. They saw nothing and refused to talk about things that Jennifer knew were real. They knew that she cut herself. The cuts on her arms were real, but the king and queen were too caught up in state visits and making speeches on television; they never discussed pain and blood. Jennifer found herself musing that if their own flesh were sliced, that might wake them up. She thought of her father’s stringy wrists, the loose skin of her mother’s throat, with professional interest.

  She decided, finally for certain, that this palace wasn’t safe anymore. Of course she was always safe, because no one could touch her, no one could get inside. But it was time to find a prince, an archbishop, a cathedral — a long, shining oyster satin train. At last she smiled, her cold mouth stretching in the grimace that made her royal father shiver when he thought of it. She went swiftly to Their Majesties’ private parlor.