by Tom La Farge
“Sir, the Domestic is away from the City.”
“He is? Oh yes, so he is. Well, the Count of the Tent, then, or the Chartulary—whoever is minding the store. Run right over, will you?”
“At your orders, Sir.” The Sacellary tapped his breast, ducked his head, and left. Let him keep his little secret. The Sacellary knew better than to ask questions when his master was pleased to be close-mouthed. And on the whole, he must admit, as rulers go this one generally knew what he was doing. The problem was not with the Despot’s projects but with the impatience that rushed them to botched completion or left them three-quarters done, too far along to be easily adapted to other purposes. Half the Sacellary’s work was a sort of large-scale bricolage, cobbling together the means to bring these dropped toys back to useful life, and he had learned much from the resourceful artificers of Walls, whose services indeed he had most often employed.
The key to working with a secretive master was knowing everything that went on. Now the Sacellary knew, though he’d never been told, that the Despot was building a dam in the north. A dozen indications led him to this conclusion. Over the last year there had been an outpouring of gold from the Treasury so severe and continuous that the Logothete General had turned quite white just whispering the figure in the Sacellary’s ear and had needed a cordial to restore him. Regular drafts of convicts traveled north under guard along a disused rail-line, which thereafter ceased to be disused and began to carry considerable traffic. The Sacellary’s friends in Watch, posted along the tracks, had noted long trains of cars loaded with steam cranes, steel rods, and stacked bags of cement rolling north in the night.
And many among the sevastoi—especially the Hook families, now being taxed on estates in enemy hands—had noticed the new magnificence of a certain court official. This Kyr Sevene was the curopalates whose charge was the Despot’s least important estate, no more than a hunting-lodge thrown up in a boar-infested jumble of hills. But these hills were cloven, two miles from the lodge, by the great cataract where the Mother of Gardens ends her leisurely sweep through grasslands and jumps down a high escarpment. Here the vast steppe, whose southernmost sliver was all the Despotate now commanded, falls to the alluvial plains that the Mother herself has built up over millennia with her unceasingly generous deposits of silt.
The Sacellary knew Sevene well; had in fact found the man his modest job when he had been turned down for a university chair on account of heretical tendencies. Sevene had lately purchased a palace in the démodé quarter of The Marsh, crumbling just inside the northeastern Gate of the Winds. The Sacellary knew the house well too; had in fact once thought briefly of buying it. It had a lovely garden, lovely—but the rooms were incurably damp. Sevene had done it over and was known to be buying up other properties in the quarter. And outside the Gate of Winds, on the banks of the Mother’s lately erratic flow (the level rising and falling in a way that seemed unconnected with northern rainfall), the old pottery works was suddenly bristling with new chimney-stacks.
And now this sudden need for copper. It still didn’t quite make sense until Walls’ Logothete of Stores, hearing the quantity named by the Sacellary, whistled and said, “What’s he going to do, wire the City?”
Electrification! It must be that. The principles had been known for half a century, but the present Despot’s grandfather had refused for religious reasons to consider a widespread application, while the mother had been too cheap. A few small generators had been built by industrialists and others, but the technology had never developed far. Walls made as large a use of it as anyone; one old watch-tower shuddered with the throbbing of their dynamo, which powered the various enterprises housed in the Inner Curtain and also a single searchlight perched atop the Old Shot Tower. But now, with a well-filled treasury to draw on, and a losing war to distract people from, the Despot’s whim marched, for a change, with political calculation. The Sacellary went at once to call upon Kyr Sevene.
12.
Electrifying the City
Over the next year trenches opened all across the City. No quarter was spared the hammering of drills or the cursing of convicts, chained in work-gangs. A coating of red dust lay on every window, and attempts to wipe it off produced only a smear. No life went undisrupted, but the greatest concentration of noise and dirt shook and soiled the fine houses of the aristocratic quarters, as trenches climbed the flanks of the volcano, converging on the Palace. A patrikia who had settled across the street from her married daughter found herself obliged, simply to visit her grandchildren, to hire a litter and be carried through five streets, then dropped at the kitchen door! A sevastos whose single pleasure was his plantation of blood iris had to watch their blue brilliance go dull with dust on the far side of a ditch. The truck that unloaded the diggers backed across his wife’s fragrance garden, and all the carp died beneath the film of oil that sealed their pond from the air.
“They arrive at six in the morning!” the kyra boomed. “They begin to scream before they’re out of the truck! And the guards are just as bad as the men. I saw one take off the top of a man’s ear with his whip! Can’t you do something?” But there was nothing the Sacellary could do.
Shutters went up all across the City. Inside, refined folk put wax in their ears and tried to read, or write letters, or sketch fanciful designs, or play games that required only gestures, no speech. Music was not to be thought of. Cooking, sewing, weaving, mending and the endless sweeping, wiping, mopping, polishing, and laundering all went on by the dim yellow light of oil lamps or candles, till the owners got fed up and left for the country.
The City emptied out. The season dwindled to nothing as theaters and restaurants went dark, the whorehouses shut their doors, and purveyors of luxury items were burdened with inventory and debt. But many of the Hook clans could not go to their country homes, for these were now in the hands of the enemy. This Shandimus, this useless general, kept falling back, fighting constant rearguard actions. Every retreat left more demesnes behind enemy lines, but worse, the fool seemed to have a taste for estates as battlefields. Each retreat, reported through the drawing-rooms by officers of Stables, left a house shelled, a barn burned, an orchard or vineyard despoiled, flocks and herds slaughtered, and stables, tack-rooms, gun-rooms, wine-cellars, picture-galleries looted.
Some Hook families owned other estates to go to. But these latifundia lay in the plains where grain is grown across empty miles, with little in the way of amenities and less of society. Others had no other place to go. They depended, moreover, on deliveries from the Hook of grain, wine, oil, mutton, poultry, fish salted or smoked; of cheeses, preserves, honey, fruit and produce; of wool, linen, silk, fine woods and stones; even of crockery and charcoal, even of peasants to train up as servants. Wet-nurses, for instance. Relaxed sexual mores and high infant mortality had once supplied them in abundance, but now they were suddenly impossible to be found. One irate sevastos complained to the Sacellary a full half-hour by the clock about the interrupted deliveries of his favorite wild-strawberry jam. The Sacellary left shaking his head, for of such grievances, he knew, with only a trivial admixture of, say, reinflamed old-believer dogma or Imperial memory, are uprisings made. Thereafter Watch doubled their patrols through the noble quarters, and many a servant’s ear was hired to listen at private doors.
Then Rhem acquired a navy. Nothing so imposing as to be out of character; no battle-cruisers or armored frigates, just a flotilla of gunboats such as their shipyards might plausibly have built. But these were uncommonly sleek and fast, armed with fat torpedoes and a recoilless gun of large bore, nesting amidships in a swiveling turret of most up-to-date design. Three such gunboats shelled the gas drums in Walwira, last deepwater port of the Despotate, and a third of Walwira burned. The Sacellary was in his box at the opera with some writer friends when the gas went off. All the little flames playing on cones of lime went out with a pop, and the singers’ lurid faces vanished, leaving only the echo of a barcarole to ring in fading pul
ses around the hall.
The City began to feel a wartime emptiness. It seemed that everything was happening in the distance while citizens went through the motions of their everyday lives, feeling starved, feeling strangled. Apothecaries noted an increased demand for eucalyptus and camphor. Except for the Despot’s inner circle, the court was heavy-hearted.
One old sevastos crystallized the mood of his class at a banquet. It was an annual gala held to raise money for the monastery to which old sevastoi commonly retired. Normally it was one of the season’s most brilliant parties, made so by the exuberance of the expectant heirs, but this one was dragging so badly that the hall fell suddenly silent just after the fish, except for this one old kyr’s twang: “The Empire never died till now.” The petulant mot, which its author had been repeating for a decade, now fell with the aptness of an omen. It was as if a veil of self-deception had been plucked away. More sevastoi went home sober that night than had ever been heard of before.
For the next several weeks no one talked of anything but the last end of the Empire. Food prices soared, and the endless ear-splitting ramification of trenches drove everyone frantic. Huge wheels of cable appeared, rumbling down each gouged thoroughfare, drawn by teams of bellowing oxen. Behind them came more gangs of chained workers, shoveling dirt into the trenches as whips cracked above their heads, and still more gangs with steam tampers to flatten down the dirt; and then the stone-breakers! Confined within realities, many among the sevastoi felt themselves diminished to mere local magistrates and landlords. They could not feel that spread of self that comes with empire. For the last fifty years they had vaguely felt there might be, somewhere, limits to their will; now they knew quite clearly where those limits stood. “Before, you never knew how far you could go,” said one retired drungarios of Stables, who had gone as far as he could in every sense, slumming his way into louche entanglements around the world.
Then the government ministries began to lop their dead wood, principally the patrician young. The Sacellary soon heard about this, when aggrieved petitions flooded his office from the families whose sons and daughters had been let go. He did what he could to take off the edge from their discontent, by handing out a pension here, a ribbon there, and to those few willing to work another appointment. The remainder formed a club, called “The Keys,” short for “sackees.” Other clubs soon formed on the same model, their membership composed of all sorts of idle malcontents: officers of Schools spoiling for a fight, abbots and archpriestesses alarmed by the heretic incursions, rakes driven off the boulevards by the works, courtesans whose discreet houses had become inaccessible, large wholesalers on the brink of ruin, brokers that now never came near the Bourse, journalists reduced to insipid stories, and theater people put out of work by the cutting of the gas lines.
Nothing could be more dangerous than such gatherings. The Sacellary kept himself informed on a daily basis. He soon found some Hook nobilissimus at or near the leadership of each; now the Hook sevastoi were increasingly enrolling as clients of the Bastards, particularly the Megas Kyr, Domestic of Schools. And he was developing Old-Believer tendencies.
Ominous, ominous. And yet the Sacellary could not scent the least whiff of a plot. Everyone seemed paralyzed. The whole City, sunken into defensive depression, numbed itself with drink and narcotics, whose flow the Sacellary instructed Watch to increase. Beneath the depression lay anger, he knew, but it did not at the moment look like taking the shape of a coup. Even the Old Bastard seemed distrait, preoccupied with his children’s misdeeds, with a messy divorce of his own, and more and more with his table. He spent days interviewing chefs, subjected them to the most exacting tests, then fired them for no obvious reason. The Sacellary could not see that the food got any better, but he was assiduously helpful with his recommendations. There was, he told the Megas Kyr, someone in Kyr Sevene’s kitchen whose sauces were quite out of the ordinary. Then the day he went out to call on him, he instructed Sevene that a dinner invitation sent the Megas Kyr would be, in all likelihood, reviewed with favorable consideration.
“The time,” said the Sacellary, “is ripe, my dear Sevene.” At this benevolent pronouncement Sevene beamed and bowed. But the Sacellary, driving off, felt the falseness of his phrase, and, as literary men will, held it at a slight mental distance the better to appreciate it, as if it were a cigar whose perfume yet coated his tongue. “The time is ripe.” No, now the time was never ripe, anything but ripe. The Empire, which had had its time, millennia upon millennia of time, had ripened, had decayed, had survived a while longer in a sort of political pickle, and now was nowhere felt or seen, the very aftertaste suddenly quite gone. As many people were dying as being born. The monasteries and the inquisitorial prisons were filling at a comparable rate. The theaters were closed in which an action ripened, except for Tauber’s, but the old man’s new comedies each turned out darker, less conclusive than the last. The events of the war on the Hook were unmarked by triumph or catastrophe; they were simply dispiriting; retreat after retreat with little ground lost but that laid quite to waste; not so many casualties (the Rhemots lost twice as many), but endemic diarrhea and a steady rate of desertion. And the City, feeling how much it lacked a reach outside the massive walls within which it felt protected and confined, submitted passively and as if anaesthetized to being cut up by the electrification.
Here his chauffeur, waved off the carriageway by a Mule, had to detour through a maze of unpaved streets in a popular quarter, the phaeton veering and bumping around and through one muddy hole after another, its shattering klaxon warning from its onset an endlessly renewed throng of ragged, shrill plebeians. The Sacellary drew the blinds and clutched his strap as the old car rocked and swayed.
It was the sort of mood that overtakes small states much under the sway of a metropolitan court. No purpose or impulse travels far without meeting and being cancelled out by its contrary. No word sparks more than a momentary response, laughter and outrage are quickly extinguished. The ruling party does not dislike such stasis. For a while, as long as hardship does not actually grind, the people are easily governed. In this case the privileged were hardest hit, and the populace rather enjoyed the discomfiture of the Hook families, whose serfs so many of their ancestors had once been. The electrification opened a range of jobs for both skilled and unskilled labor. The dance halls and estaminets were lively enough, as waltz after waltz traveled through the accordion bands and glasses emptied at a toss were promptly refilled. But it wasn’t to last forever. In these conditions some message comes when least looked for, some whiff of a future and an errand; or, failing that, some new thought, some new fashion, some new recipe, that at the very least recomposes finitude and arrest until they gain some smack of desire. The Sacellary wondered where it was going to come from and whose interests it would serve. He hoped the Electrification would be it.
13.
The Lamps Go On In Mole Place
And so, about eighteen months after Shandimus’ Force first set out to chastise Rhem, and ten months into the Long Fall Back, Root limped into the Sacellary’s office to collect his pension, and the Sacellary, hearing his gruff voice in the antechamber, brought him in for a glass of wine. “Have you seen this new thing of Drytung’s?” asked Root.
“No. No, I haven’t.” The Sacellary was surprised; he was usually among the first recipients of a new work of literature. “Some poems?”
“It’s one long poem. An epistle. ‘Letter from the Field,’ he calls it. It’s about the war. There’s a general, Hadu—that’s Shandimus.”
“Not a satire, I hope?”
“No, not at all. Just the opposite. Go see for yourself, it’s in the window at Wassillis Mole’s in Mole Place.”
“I thought Drytung was at the front?” asked the Sacellary. He knew very well that he was, he’d seen him off himself. Drytung had asked to be sent back. His reasons had not been coherently expressed, but the Sacellary divined that the poet was hoping to woo the Corsator Annag, with w
hose charms he appeared, poor chap, to be smitten.
But there were also stories about him and Root. They had taken lodgings together, a farmhouse on a gorse-clad spur of the volcano, with the City down below them to one side and the Vale of Nahloon on the other. It was in fact a Walls smallholding, the lease of which the Sacellary had secured for them through the Company’s Realty Bandum. A pretty spot with good air, fine views, too stony for farming but excellent for gardening, bees, and vines.
He had been out to visit. He remembered the upstairs room, the old granary, that ran the length of the house with a long table in it. Root sat at one end to write and Drytung at the other. Between them the middle was all piled delightfully with a jumble of lamps, books, pipes, papers, rocks, rags and scraps, tankards, skulls, statuettes, flowerpots, toys, jars of pens and feathers, incense-burners, paperweights, bronzes, a bowl of coins, and all the charming trash that literary men accumulate. To the Sacellary it had seemed a paradise but to Drytung, evidently, not.
Well, rumor had it that he and Root had been sharing a woman! A girl, really; she had waited on them at dinner. Well, well, he’d said nothing. Of course he knew her, that “cunt” from Walls that once had cooked for Shandimus himself. Thin little black thing, not much to her but wiry hair, but an amazingly good cook. Rumor did not say whether Root and Drytung had her at the same time. No, but one or the other had gotten her with child. Perhaps, who knew, both! She had lately been delivered of twins. The Sacellary knew this because she, this ’Nna, was the girl cooking for Kyr Sevene now; it was she who made the sauces. Such sauces! She and Root were lodging in the City, in rooms in the old Pretoriat, now a ruinous and squalid caravanserai that the people called the Fondooq.