Kalpa Imperial Read online

  “Nothing.”

  This, too, was by way of expiation, said the empress, except that it was a farce like all the rest, since nobody expected the child to die of hunger. Yet it wasn’t a farce, because Livna’lams was never hungry. The nobles pleaded with him to eat so that he’d grow strong, brave, just, handsome, and good, as an emperor should be. The little boy assented, and they all went on to a dining room where a table was spread and eleven servants looked after the plates, the silver, the goblets, the platters, the napkins, the decorations, the water the crown prince drank and what little food he ate, while the noblemen looked on and approved, standing behind the chair of ancient, fragrant wood covered with cushions and tapestries. Every dish, every mouthful, every sip, every movement was meticulously planned and controlled by the Protocol of the Palace. And when all that was done, another servant opened the door of the room, and other noblemen escorted the emperor-to-be, and now came the moment, the only moment in the day, when the son and the mother met.

  Even misfortune has its advantages, say the wise. Of course the wise say stupid things, because even wisdom has its foolishness, say I. But there’s no question but that being down has its up side. If Livna’lams hadn’t been such a sorrowful prince, in that moment he might have been frightened, or angry, or in despair. But sorrow filled him till he couldn’t feel anything. Nothing mattered to him, not even the Empress Hallovâh, his mother.

  She would be sitting dressed in white on a great chair upholstered in white velvet, surrounded by her seventy-seven maids of honor, who wore bright colors and were loaded with gold and jewels, crowned with diadems, shod with embroidered satin slippers, their hands and wrists beringed and braceleted. As the prince came, in all the ladies bowed deeply and the empress stood up, for though she was his mother, he was going to be the emperor. She greeted him: “May the day be propitious for you, Prince.”

  He replied, “May the day be propitious for you, Mother.”

  Even you ignorant louts who don’t know beans about anything let alone palaces and courts can see how differently they behaved towards each other. But then, while all the ladies in waiting stayed bowed down to the ground in submission, the Empress Hallovâh acted as if she felt tenderness towards the child: kissed him, stroked his face, asked him how he’d slept, if he’d had good dreams, if he loved her, if he’d like to go walking in the gardens with her. The prince would take one of the woman’s hands in his and reply: “I slept very well and my dreams were happy and serene, Mother. I love you very much, Mother. Nothing would please me more than to walk in the gardens, Mother.”

  When this section of the Protocol was complete, the prince and the empress walked side by side holding hands to the great glass doors that opened on the gardens. As they reached them, the woman would stop and look at her son: “Though we are happy,” she would say, “we cannot enjoy our good fortune until we have completed our duties, painful as they may be.”

  “I was about to suggest to you, Mother,” the prince would reply, “that as leaders and protectors of our beloved people, we owe our happiness to them, and our principal task is to see that justice is done to the living and the dead.”

  “The dead can wait, Prince.”

  At this point in the dialogue the ladies, still all doubled over curtsying, felt some relief at the thought that soon they’d be able to straighten up their backs and necks.

  “That is so, Mother; but not the people, who await our judgment on which of the dead were great men and which were traitors.”

  The ladies straightened up. The prince and the empress were already in the gardens. Sun or snow or rain or wind or hail, lightning, thunder, whatever the weather, the two of them, the little boy and the woman in white, walked every morning to the central fountain, where eight marble swans opened their wings to the water falling from a basin of alabaster. South of the fountain, paths ran through a grove, and following one of them deep into the shadows—green in the sunlight, dark in storm—they came to what once had been a statue. Had been, I say. There wasn’t much of it left. The pedestal was intact, but the pink-grained marble had been scratched all over with a chisel to erase the inscription, the names and dates. Above that nothing remained but a shapeless lump of white marble, whether pink-grained or not you couldn’t tell, it was so battered and filthy. It might have been the figure of a man; looking carefully you could make out the stump of an arm, a ruined leg, a truncated, headless neck, something like a torso. In front of it the prince and the empress stood and waited. The noblemen arrived, then the ladies, then the officers of the palace guard and the soldiers, magistrates, lawyers, and functionaries. And behind them came the servants, trying to peer over the heads of the gentry to see what happened.

  What happened was, day after day, the same, always exactly the same. Some moments of silence, till everything within the palace walls seemed to have fallen still. And then suddenly, at the same instant, the joined voices of the mother and son: “We curse you!” they said. “May you be cursed, may you be damned, hated, loathed, despised forever! May your memory waken only rancor towards you, your face, your deeds. We curse you!”

  Another silence, and the empress spoke: “Treason degrades and corrupts all that it touches,” she said. “I vow to heaven and earth and all the peoples therein to expiate for the rest of my life the guilt of having been your wife, of having shared your throne, your table, and your bed.”

  Again everyone was silent. The boy prince took a whip which one of the noblemen offered him, a pearl-handled whip, seventeen strands, tipped with steel hooks. With it he struck at the statue, what was left of it: twenty blows that echoed through the grove. Sometimes a bird got the notion to start singing just at that moment, and this was considered a lamentable occurrence to be discussed in low voices during all the rest of the day throughout the palace, from the throne room to the kitchens. But we know that the birds and beasts, the plants, the waters all have their own protocol, and evidently have no intention of changing it for a human one.

  And what happened next, you ask? Oh, good people, everything had been arranged, as you can imagine. Or can’t imagine, since if you could imagine anything you wouldn’t have come here to listen to stories and whine like silly old women if the storyteller leaves out one single detail. So, next, another nobleman received the whip from the hands of the prince, who then approached his mother. The empress stooped, because her son was still a little boy, and held out the polished locket that hung from her neck on the chain of black iron links. She opened it. The boy spat into it, onto a face and name cut in the white stone and half scratched out with a sharp tool, the face and name of the dead man, the emperor, his father.

  No, I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you the name of the ninth emperor of the Hehvrontes dynasty, because I don’t know it. Nobody does. It’s a name that is not remembered. His guilt and treason, so they said, had been so horrible that his name was never to be pronounced again. Moreover, that name was erased from the annals, the laws, the decrees, from history books, official registries, monuments, coins, escutcheons, maps, poems. Poems, because the emperor had written songs and poems ever since he was a boy. Unfortunately he’d been a good poet, good enough that the people got hold of his verses and sang them, back in those happy days when he reigned in peace. And to tell you the truth, many of his poems survived despite everything, and it’s said that Livna’lams heard them sung in distant provinces when he himself was emperor. But memory is weak, and that’s a blessing, so say the wise. And I know, because I know a lot of things, that it was a wise man who said or wrote that time’s mirror loses all it reflects. Memory is weak, and people had forgotten where those songs came from. What mattered was that the name be forgotten. And it was.

  So the empress left the despicable locket open on her breast, turned her back on the broken statue, and started back to the palace with her son. Then came the procession. Everybody, the most important persons first, the others following, finally the servants, passed the statue, and all did their utmost
to express hatred and contempt. Some spat on it, some kicked it, some struck it with sticks or chains or their belts, some smeared it with mud or muck, and some, hoping that their exploit would reach the ears of the empress, went so far as to bring a little bag full of yesterday’s turds and empty them out on the marble.

  On their return to the galleries of the palace, the prince and the empress saluted each other and parted. She would spend the rest of the morning in meetings with her ministers; in the afternoon she was occupied with affairs of justice and official proceedings. The little boy met with his teachers and studied history, geography, mathematics, music, strategy, politics, dance, falconry, and all the things an emperor has to know so that later on he can do everything that makes him feel that doing it makes him the emperor.

  I said he was a sorrowful prince, young Livna’lams; he was a bright one too, alert, intelligent. There’s another of the advantages of sorrow: it doesn’t dull the intellect as depression and rancor do. His teachers had soon discovered that the boy learned in ten minutes what might take most boys an hour, not to mention totally moronic princes incapable of learning anything. And as he was seven, an important age, and as the noblemen were always present during his studies to supervise the process, they had arrived at a tacit agreement to depart, secretly, from the Protocol: the teachers taught what they had to teach, Livna’lams learned what he had to learn, and then everybody could go do what they pleased—the schoolmasters could burrow into their books, or write boring treatises on themes they believed to be original and important, or get drunk, or play dice, or plot crimes against their colleagues, and the prince could seek a little solitude.

  Sometimes he found it in the music rooms, sometimes in the stables or the libraries. But he always found it in the far corners of the palace gardens. Only if he was extremely lucky could he touch an instrument, talk to the horses and the mares with young foals, or read a book, without a music teacher appearing, or a riding master, or a librarian, bowing and scraping and asking to be of service or just standing around waiting for orders. But almost never, or in truth never, was there anyone under the garden walls, among the dense thickets, the hidden benches, the bricked-up doors, the dry fountains, the pergolas. I don’t know what the prince did there. I think he just let time pass. I think he saw and heard things that had not been included in the Protocol. I think that, sorrowfully as ever, he tried to love something—beetles with hard, iridescent wingcases, sprouting weeds, the dirt, stones fallen from the walls.

  Now listen carefully, because one day something happened. The day was grey and muggy, and what happened was this: the prince heard voices. I don’t mean he went mad or was divinely inspired. He heard somebody talking, and it alarmed him.

  Weren’t the librarians and the riding masters enough? Was he going to have to start hiding even from the gardeners? He looked around, thinking that was it: some idiot had discovered these forgotten corners of the garden and decided to acquire merit by getting the paths sanded, the trees pruned, the benches restored, and worst of all, the thickets cut down.

  “I think you’re as crazy as I am,” said a mild, slow voice.

  A burst of laughter, and a second voice said, “Friend, I can’t say you’re wrong.” This voice was deeper, richer, stronger.

  Those aren’t gardeners, Livna’lams said to himself. Gardeners don’t talk like that, or laugh like that. And he was right. Do any of you have the honor of being acquainted with a gardener? They are admirable people, believe me, but they don’t go around making comments on their own or other people’s mental condition. They stay close to the ground, and know many names in different languages, and nothing in this world impresses them much, since they see life in the right way, as it should be seen, from below looking up, and in concentric circles. But what do you know about all that and how could it interest you? All you want to know is what happened in the palace garden that day when the prince heard voices.

  All right, all right, I’ll tell you what happened, just as truly as if I’d been there myself. Those aren’t gardeners, the little boy said to himself, and so nobody’s going to come and clear out the thickets; and that pleased him. And since he was pleased, he got up from the steps he’d been sitting on and walked, trying not to make noise, towards the place where the men were talking. Now, he wasn’t used to walking silently in an overgrown garden; he might manage to be noiseless in the palace corridors, but not here. He trod on a dry stick, a pebble rolled under his foot, he brushed up against a bush, and then, there in front of him, was a huge man, the tallest, broadest man he’d ever seen, very dark, with coal-black beard and hair and eyes. The man took hold of the prince’s arm with a gigantic, powerful hand. The prince squeaked out, “How dare you, you insolent fellow!”

  The giant laughed. It was the deep, tremendous laugh Livna’lams had heard a minute earlier. But he didn’t let go. “Ah ha ha ha!” he went, and then, “Come see what we’ve got here!”

  He wasn’t talking to the prince but to the owner of the other voice, who was standing behind the big man. This one was shorter and slighter, lanky, also very tanned, cleanshaven, with tangled black hair, bright black eyes that looked amused, a wide mouth and a long, delicate neck.

  “I think it might be best to let him go,” he said in a lazy, quiet voice.

  “Why?” said the giant. “Why should I? No telling how long he’s been listening. Better not let him go. Better give him a good beating to teach him not to spy, so he forgets that he even came around here this morning.”

  “No beatings,” said the other man. “Unless you want us shorter by a head.”

  The big fellow considered this possibility, and you can bet your puny little life savings that he didn’t like it; he opened his fist and let the boy go. The prince brushed off his silken sleeve and looked at the two men. He wasn’t afraid. They say princes are never afraid but don’t believe it, it’s a lie. They’re afraid not only when they ought to be but sometimes when there’s nothing to fear, and there have even been some who have lived in fear and died of fear. But Livna’lams wasn’t afraid. He looked at them and saw they wore coarse clothing like fieldworkers or bricklayers, ordinary sandals, a worn pouch hanging from the belt. He also saw that they weren’t afraid of him, which didn’t surprise him—what was there to fear?—and that they didn’t seem disposed to bow or do homage or await his orders in silence. That did surprise him.

  “Who are you?” he asked them.

  “Oh, you’d like to know that, wouldn’t you now!” said the great big fellow.

  This totally non-Protocolish reply, this rude and blustering reply, didn’t offend the prince at all. He liked it.

  “Yes, I’d like to know,” he said, crossing his arms.

  “But I’m not going to tell you, snotnose.”

  “Hey, hey, Renka,” said the other man.

  “And I’d like to know what you’re doing here, too,” said the young prince.

  “We’d just finished our work, Prince,” said the shorter man, “and we were taking a break.”

  “How did you know who I am?” said the prince, at the same time as the big fellow said, “This tadpole is a prince?”

  The man answered Renka first: “Yes, which is why I told you that if you gave him a lick they’d have our heads,” and then, to Livna’lams: “By your clothes.”

  “What does a bricklayer know about what a prince wears?” the boy asked.

  “Listen, tadpole,” said Renka. “Listen up, because I don’t care if you’re a prince. We aren’t bricklayers. We’re adventurers, and therefore philosophers, and therefore although we aren’t going to beat you up, being fond of having our heads attached at the neck, neither are we going to play monkey tricks and bob up and down in reverence to Your Majesty.”

  At this the boy did something really wonderful, really magnificent. He uncrossed his arms, threw his head back, and laughed with all his heart.

  “We aren’t clowns, either,” said Renka, deeply insulted.

  But the o
ther man, who was called Loo’Loö, which isn’t a name or if it’s a name it’s a very unusual one, threw his head back too, and holding his sides he laughed right along with the prince. Big Renka looked at them, very serious, and scratched his head, and when Livna’lams and Loo’Loö quit laughing and wiped their eyes, he said, “If you want my opinion, you’re both crazy. I’m not surprised. Philosophers and princes have a definite tendency to go crazy. Though I never heard of a tadpole with sense enough to go crazy.”

  The boy laughed again and then all three sat down on the ground and talked.

  They talked about a lot of things that day, but when the sun was high in the sky the prince stood up and said he had to go, they’d be expecting him in the palace for lunch.

  “Too bad,” said Renka. “We’ve got cheese,” and he gave a loving pat to the pouch that hung from his wide belt, “and we’re going to buy wine and fruit.”

  The prince took this as an invitation. “But I can’t,” he said.

  “How come?” said Renka.

  Young Livna’lams turned away and set off. After a couple of steps, he stopped and looked back at the two men. Loo’Loö was still sitting on the ground, chewing a grass-blade. “I don’t know,” he said. “Tomorrow, when your work’s done, will you come here again?”

  “I say no,” said Renka. “I say we’ve sweated enough in this damned part of this hellish city, but he insists on staying, and since I’m kind and generous and have a heart as tender as a dove in love and can’t watch a friend suffer, I let him have his way.” He sighed.