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  Renka put his immense, dark hands on the prince’s shoulders and looked down at him smiling, and then drew away from him and turned to go without a glance, even of mockery, at the empress. Loo’Loö, instead, bent down and hugged the little boy, and Livna’lams rested his head for a moment against the man’s chest.

  “Good-bye,” Loo’Loö said, and looked at the pale woman, and went.

  The two men disappeared among the branches. When the sound of their steps could no longer be heard, Prince Ferret called to the captain of the guard.

  “Highness!” said the brute, squaring his shoulders and clicking his boot-heels.

  “You will answer to me with your life for the lives of those two men,” said Livna’lams in his high little boyish voice, in which you could already hear the tone of an emperor giving orders. “You will follow them without their seeing you. Others will be following you without your seeing them. You’ll look out for them without their knowing it, and you’ll be watched without your knowing it. And you will not come back to the palace till they’re safely across the border of the eastern provinces.”

  The captain saluted again and marched off with his soldiers and his executioner. Prince Ferret looked at his mother with a certain icy curiosity, and she endured his gaze until she was doubled over by a spasm of coughing. Then they walked back to the palace, he leading, she following with bruised, bare feet.

  You’ve all read something somewhere or heard something about Emperor Ferret’s reign. Whatever you’ve read or heard, I tell you that he was a just man. He was mad, but he ruled well. Maybe you have to be a bit touched to be a ruler, good or bad. For, as the wise say, a sensible man looks after his garden, and a coward looks after his money; a just man cares about his city and a crazy man cares about the government; and a wise man studies the thickness of fern-fronds.

  He was the last emperor of the Hehvrontes dynasty. During his reign, the Protocol so laboriously constructed by his ancestors began to deteriorate, and unforeseen phrases and unrehearsed gestures entered palace life. Very soon after the two adventurers left, while he was still a child, he stopped attending the ceremony of contempt for the nameless emperor, his father. Some say that the day before he stopped going, he had a long conversation with his mother, or rather that he talked for a long time and she listened, but this isn’t written down anywhere and frankly I don’t believe it. What is recorded in the history books is that the Empress Hallovâh never went back to the wood either, and so the ritual ceased. She locked herself up in her rooms, where she slowly withered away, seen by no one but her maids, giving her orders through an opaque screen. Young Livna’lams succeeded to the throne when he was ten, upon the death of his mother, whom he did not go to see when she was dying. He had her buried with all due honor, but he did not attend the funeral.

  He married when he reached marrying age. He had a principal wife who was crowned empress, and six secondary wives. But he never slept with any of them, or as far as I know with any woman, or man, or animal—nobody, nothing. He ordered all the noble families with children to leave the court and the palace; they could keep their goods and privileges, on condition that they never return as long as he lived. And more: any servant, soldier, magistrate, official, who had children or whose wife got pregnant, had to leave the court. And at the same time as he gave such orders, he was dealing out justice wisely, distributing land, founding schools and hospitals, beautifying the capital, the cities, and the towns, making food and water and medical help available to everybody, peacefully consolidating the borders, protecting the arts, and helping anybody who needed help.

  Unfortunately, one of his untouched secondary wives got pregnant. She was very beautiful, stupid, and soft-hearted, and had a lovely voice.

  He didn’t punish her, as everybody thought he would. He let her go, free, rich, and healthy, with her lover, an assistant fencing-master in the officer training program, who was also beautiful, stupid, and probably soft-hearted, though quite unable to sing. Three days after that, Emperor Ferret signed an insane decree: every man who wished to stay at court must be castrated. He was mad, no doubt of it; but the men who preferred mutilation to leaving the court were madder. And there were plenty of them, since it was from among them that Obonendas I, the Eunuch, arose. He wasn’t a bad emperor, though many would disagree.

  Emperor Ferret never lost his anger, though in fact it didn’t keep him from being sensible, just, mad, and possibly wise. And he was never a coward, for our songs still tell the glory of his death, even after so many years, lifting their triumphant rhythms in taverns and town squares, quarries and sawmills and battlefields. But that—as they say another storyteller used to say—is another story.

  The Siege, Battle, and Victory of Selimmagud

  The storyteller said: He was called Rabavt-tuar and was engrossed in the praiseworthy task of stealing absinthe when the imperial soldiers caught him. They said he was a deserter and carried him off. He tried to explain to them that he wasn’t a deserter because he’d never been a soldier. He’d been born in the back room of the Thousand Delights Inn, the son of a Southern prostitute and, presumably, somebody else, though nobody ever knew who. What happened between then and his seventeenth year, when the soldiers found him robbing the experimental farm and hastily declared him a deserter, is a sordid history that has nothing to do with Selimmagud. As a child he lived with a snake charmer—“snake” being a euphemism for certain creatures that hide under rocks along riverbanks. The snake charmer, who may have been his father, though many tellers of tales insist it’s unlikely, wasn’t a bad fellow, and provided food and a bed whenever such luxuries were at his disposal. In return the boy assisted him in his act in circuses and small-town theaters and looked after his beloved little slimy pets. The snake charmer was called, or called himself, Bollopoppoll; he never washed, insisting that bathing destroys the natural protective agents of the skin; he got drunk frequently; he loved dark women and rings with colored stones; he died in a ditch with his heart split open by a knife wielded by somebody who mistook him for somebody else. But while he was still alive with nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep, which happened increasingly often, he sent Rabavt-tuar out to steal.

  The soldiers who took him prisoner had been no luckier in life than he had. There were five of them, under the command of a sergeant whose consuming interest as a military man consisted in flaying and burning prisoners as slowly as possible. He did this without the general’s knowledge, so he had to make do with the few prisoners he could smuggle into camp without being seen by the guards. But none of them lasted as long as he would have liked, and this, plus the wound in his left thigh, which wouldn’t heal and kept oozing a stinking yellowish fluid, convinced him that the world owed him something and that it was his duty to take it by force. It was this sergeant who ordered that the prisoner’s hands be tied behind his back. The soldiers were on horseback. The rope was long. A soldier on each side of him held each end of the rope, while he walked between the horses. The sergeant led the troop, keeping his hand on the damp, sticky left leg of his trousers. There were no other prisoners in camp.

  Rabavt-tuar wore blue pants and nothing else. He was barefoot, so by the time they got to the camp his feet were cut and bleeding. The heavy darkness in the sergeant’s heart lifted a little, just a tiny bit, when he saw that.

  They put the boy in a tent and left him there, tied up. He lay on the hard ground to sleep. Wanting to go to sleep, he thought about Sonora’s daughter so he could dream about her, but it wasn’t till dawn that he dreamed, and then it was a dream about those damned snakes. He was putting them into a sack he’d taken from the experimental farm, and one of them was always escaping and the others were howling and tearing up the sack with the horns on their little wedge-shaped heads.

  Then the trumpets sounded. The sun had not yet risen. He sat up laboriously; his wrists, his feet, his eyes, his stomach hurt. A veteran of the Jerimadian Wars said that no symphony can compare with the sounds of an encampment waki
ng up. He didn’t say it in those words, to be sure, and he had to be blind drunk to contemplate his past with the slightest benevolence, and yet he loved army life, and sometimes could express that love to other people.

  As for the little thief, hero, traitor, prince consort, whatever you want to call him, he thought he’d been forgotten. But no, they hadn’t forgotten him. The sergeant with the sore in his left thigh remembered him; he sent a surgeon to look after him. Since the general was a soft-hearted man, and the sergeant had his own plans, not yet very clear, but exciting plans, he wanted the general to know that everything possible had been done for the prisoner. The surgeon attended to the boy’s lacerated feet, untied his hands, and gave orders that he be given something to eat.

  The day went by. There was a lot of noise in camp, but no fighting. Rabavt-tuar was scared of getting mixed up in a battle. There had been no battles for months and months. The besieged city remained silent.

  Along in the afternoon the prisoner heard the general’s voice. He knew it was the general because nobody else was talking and only that one voice could be heard amidst the tramp of feet, the crunch of boots on sandstone. Though he couldn’t make out what it was saying it was a deep voice, not loud. It talked on and on and then was lost in the distance along with the tramping feet. He started worrying again that they’d forgotten him. Then he thought about the sack he’d left at the farm, a good cloth sack, machine-woven at Threeworlds, stolen from a bakery; he thought about Sonora’s daughter, and about escaping. But when he went to look he found an armed guard at the tent door. He sat down on the ground and waited, that being all he could do. Food was brought to him. And at nightfall the sergeant came in, wearing clean trousers he had just put on. He looked at the boy and said, “The general wants to see you.”

  He spoke between clenched teeth, so that the thief felt he was being spat on.

  Behind the sergeant came a soldier who he thought was not one of the ones who had arrested him, carrying some clothes: sandals, white pants, a white shirt, a green sash. And they brought him a wash-basin with water, soap, sponge, towel, and razor. The sergeant stood there watching him the whole time. Then the sergeant called, and two soldiers came to take him to the general’s tent. His feet hurt when he walked, even in the soft leather sandals. He was clean, combed, shaved, and uncomfortable.

  The general’s white tent was right in the center of the encampment. Banners fluttered on high poles on either side of the entrance: the imperial flag and the flag of the Seventh Imperial Army of Assault.

  “In,” they said, and pushed him in.

  There was nobody but the general in the tent.

  The general was the doomed son of the Duchess of Coldwinter and Marshal Koopt, a miserable marriage if ever there was one. The duchess preferred women, the marshal preferred men. They had fourteen children, eight boys and six girls. The general, their fifth son, had joined the army at fifteen; he was thirty now, the bravest man in the whole world.

  Inside the tent the ground was covered by a crimson carpet with gold arabesques. There were seven standing lamps, all alight. There was a marble fountain with a golden flower from which the water sprang. There was a hearth where logs were burning, platters of fruit, cushions, a couch.

  The general was lying on the couch wearing a tunic of pink gauze, a crown of wildflowers on his head. A short sword hung from his belt of gilt links. His fair, sleek hair drooped down to his waist. He had gold rings on his fingers, gold bracelets on his wrists. His feet were bare.

  “Come in,” he said, and stood up.

  He was no taller than the thief, and as thin as the thief, but he was a General of the Empire and had won two hundred battles. He walked around Rabavt-tuar and settled back onto the couch.

  “What were you doing in the experimental farm?” he asked.

  “Stealing.”

  “Stealing what?”

  “Eggs.”

  “What for?”

  “To sell.”

  “Would you like to have a lot of money?”

  “Yes,” said the thief.

  “A lot—really a lot?”

  The thief didn’t answer.

  “It’s easy enough,” said the general, stretching out on the couch. “I expect you know who I am?”

  “The general.”

  The general laughed. “Of course, dear boy. There are lots of generals in the Empire, but only one General Sabirtowol, Duke of Frilusa, Viscount Albantares, Baron Rocaparida, Lord of Previostoros, of Uzimal’ou, of Valabá, and another hundred and seventy-two titles which I can’t remember. Those are the battles I won.”

  The thief knew who the general was, obviously. It’s possible that in the whole Empire, so vast that the emperor himself wasn’t sure of its boundaries, there was nobody who didn’t know who the general was.

  “I’m going to give you a chest full of gold,” the general said, yawning. “It’s a long time since I met a suitable man. We don’t take many prisoners, and so many of them get themselves killed trying to escape. And you can understand that it’s unwise for a general to sleep with his officers, still less with his soldiers.”

  He got up again and came close to the thief, unbuttoned his shirt and untied his sash. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll use the pillows, the couch is too narrow.”

  He ordered the thief to strip, come on, hurry up, while he stretched himself out on the cushions. He lifted his tunic to his waist, his gold bracelets clashing.

  The thief approached. He thought as hard as he could about Sonora’s daughter, without looking at the general. He knelt down between the general’s legs. As the general was a hermaphrodite, to the extent that it’s said that at twenty he impregnated himself and bore a child as androgynous as himself, the thief’s task presented considerable difficulties. He had to arouse the general’s masculine organ in order to get at the general’s feminine organ. Little by little he stopped thinking about Sonora’s daughter and remembered his dream about the snakes tearing up the cloth sack from Threeworlds. By now he was convinced that slimy little creatures with wedge-shaped heads were hiding between the general’s legs. He collapsed onto the pillows, sobbing.

  “Imbecile,” said the general. “Useless fool.”

  He pulled the tunic down to his ankles and sat up, leaning on one elbow. “No gold for you,” he said. “None. I’ll have you hung by your thumbs a foot above the ground. With a sign on your chest saying ‘Thief—Impotent—Coward.’ And I’ll order my soldiers to spit at you.”

  Stark naked, the thief reached out to the general’s side, snatched the sword from his belt, and, still sobbing, cut his throat. The blood of the bravest, handsomest general of the Empire soaked the cushions and the carpet. The thief dragged the cushions over the body and lay down on them. No question of sleeping: the lamplight burned in his eyes, and he couldn’t let go his grip on the sword. He stood up and put out the lamps. He wiped the sword on the carpet and waited in the reddish darkness.

  When the trumpets sounded, the blood had long since stopped flowing and the tent was dark. A soldier parted the curtain at the entrance and announced that the general’s clothes were being brought.

  “No,” the thief said, low-voiced. “Armor. Weapons. Helmet.”

  The soldier went off. The naked thief sat astride the cushions that hid the body of General Sabirtowold, Duke of Frilusa, Viscount Albantares, Baron Rocaparida, Lord of Previostoros, of Uzimal’ou, of Valabá, and a hundred and seventy-two more titles.

  The soldier returned carrying the general’s armor, shield, helmet, and weapons. The thief got dressed. He hid his dark hair under the plumed helmet and wrapped himself in the cape, concealing his face in the folds. He came out of the tent and ordered that his horse be brought. They led up the finest charger in the camp. He mounted and gave the order: “Make ready for battle!” The trumpets sounded.

  The thief made a speech to the troops. It wasn’t hard for him. In ten different provinces he’d almost always convinced the police of his innocence, so why
shouldn’t he convince several thousand soldiers who’d been doing nothing at all for months that it was time to launch an attack? The soldiers of the Imperial Seventh Regiment liked fighting. Each of them was certain he’d survive and if anybody had to die it would be the next fellow. They didn’t know who Abraham de Moivre had been, or Augustus Morgan, or Stanislas Noisescu. And it had been too long since they’d done any looting and burning and getting drunk among the ruins. They formed into three divisions and marched out onto the plain.

  “First the battering rams,” the thief said to the general’s staff officers riding at his side.

  He was right. The walls of the city had resisted every weapon the Empire had invented. They must attack the gates. But the officers hesitated.

  “We’ll lose a lot of men,” one said.

  The thief laughed, behind the folds of the cape. He raised his clean and shining sword and galloped towards the city. The soldiers followed, shouting the general’s name.

  They never got to use the battering rams. The enemy opened fire from the walls. The plain was strewn with mutilated bodies. The sergeant who had taken prisoner a certain Rabavt-tuar in the depths of an experimental farm, and who had hoped that being young and strong he might last longer than the others, was one of the last to fall. He was galloping—so he thought—behind his general, when at the top of the talus a hail of projectiles mowed him down; he survived for a few minutes, long enough to realize that he had no legs and blood was bubbling out of his gaping belly and to curse the man who led him to his death.

  If the thief had stayed to look around, he would have seen trickles of blood running from mouths and wounded chests and broken heads and he would have seen how these trickles ran together and formed streams, rivers, waterfalls among the stones.

  Not a man remained alive beneath the walls. Not one, except the thief. He threw off the cape, tied it to the clean and shining sword, and waved it before the gates. The gates opened. The thief entered the city of Selimmagud.