"Lithuania, my lord," said Father.
"What were we talking about?" asked the Concerned One.
"About Cleander and his plots, my lord," said Father.
"Cleander, yes," agreed the Concerned One. "He's out to take my place, you know. I need you to protect me. Take charge of these Mexican police chaps I have around here. I need time. A counterplot is under way against Cleander. I already said that, didn't I? Well, you know all about that anyway. I have to run, General Black. Can't lollygag the whole day away talking to you."
Father rose when the emperor did, and he bowed until the Concerned One and his two companions had exited the room.
"Splendid fellow," he heard the emperor tell his two friends before the door was closed behind them. "I always had a place in my heart for the old boy."
Father threw himself into the new assignment that very afternoon and did his usual efficient job. He dismissed the guards on duty who had families or were under thirty years of age. Father reasoned-with some assistance from me-that family men could be compromised by Cleander and young men could get themselves involved with the chamberlain's female agents during their off-duty hours. Father recruited two thousand additional men for palace duty from the naval station at Tampico. These sailors were grateful for what they considered soft duty on the palace grounds, and the emperor's half-naked regal person awed them as it no longer did the jaded soldiers already stationed in the capital. Better yet, these old sea dogs were ignorant of matters of state, making them the complete opposites of the all-too-knowledgeable City Guardsmen they replaced.
By an odd bit of good luck, it happened that most of the emperor's secret informers in Mexico at this time were either policemen or state bureaucrats working for the chamberlain. Unless Cleander wanted to spy upon himself, the men working beneath him availed him no use as secret agents, and the policemen were all locked up in the sprawling palace hallways with the emperor. As aging veterans of the rural federales or of the quartermaster corps, the spies among the policemen were too old to join the elite City Guardsmen. Years of eavesdropping and betraying others had made nearly everyone in the area despise them, save for the emperor, whose vices were already common knowledge and to whom the policemen had taken an oath of loyalty. If the Concerned One were to die and Cleander to seize the purple robe, any informers within the palace would be put to death as soon as the change came, and therefore the usually most devious men in the city could be counted upon to be the most loyal to the emperor's cause.
Father kept his man Medus with him in the palace, where the Concerned One had given him a suite of rooms. Father sent Helen and myself to a villa belonging to Mr. Golden deep in the countryside north of the city. Other families able to afford the refuge joined the two of us in that remote locale while Garden City suffered the visitation of new diseases that, like the new metal plague, were no doubt created in Asia. I felt enormous guilt in being so far from my father while he was endangered both by Cleander's wiles and by the natural calamity that was befalling the city. The beauty of the estate we had as our temporary home made my guilty feelings that much stronger. Each day I awoke amid the green vineyards and horse pastures and I contrasted them in my mind with the scenes of horror that would be besetting Father at the same moment. In the twisting streets beyond the public spaces lying in the center of Garden City, corpses wrapped in coarse cloth sheets were left each night before the facades of every house and tenement hall; horse-drawn carts carried them away like cordwood before the morning. In our villa we watched the farmhands gather the grapes as they ripened and listened to them sing an old song in Spanish about the Weeping Woman.
Those who have seen the results of the diseases the enemies of the Empire send to punish us know the cursed microbial visitors can take many forms. There is first a kind of new influenza that makes its victims cough and spit green bile until they reduce themselves to shells of the people they once were. In the lower elevations of the Empire's tropical zones there is a new strain of malaria that can strike when the mosquitoes swarm in the summer; the stricken there will perspire and become progressively weaker until they swoon into a sleep from which they never awaken. The third and more common type of new viral plague, the variety that was ravishing the capital during the tenth year of the Concerned One's rule, was a new type of smallpox that was as devastating to everyone it struck as the new metal plague had been to anyone with mechanical implants; anyone this affliction came upon developed telltale swellings upon his skin and either recovered or lost hope within a week's time. Because we had no medical understanding of this type of smallpox and because superstition flourishes wherever there is ignorance, the citizens of Garden City fancied they could protect themselves by burning incense at the front doors of their homes throughout the day and night, for there was an ancient folk belief revived among the people which proclaimed that incense purified bad air. Those able to afford unlimited supplies of incense wore smoldering burners around their necks or put lit sticks of it in their hair to protect themselves while they were on the street. Some in the city said the affliction in fact came from eating food grown in the organic way; they recalled that in the old days the Empire's citizens never caught the pox when they ate only the fruits of fields that had been enhanced by chemical fertilizers. Many others, including many at the villa in which Helen and I were staying, believed the old Christian God had sent the plague because the people were accepting new religions from the southern world. The devotees of this theory held the followers of El Bis to be the worst offenders, as members of that sect worship only one new god, the supreme Singer of Songs, and reject all the old ones, while followers of other new deities, such as Invictus or Sophia, often continue to adore the gods of their ancestors in addition to the new ones. The followers of El Bis themselves claimed the plague marked the end of the world. They gathered in torchlit congregations in the dead of night in secret places far beyond Garden City's suburbs and listened to their priests explain that more than three hundred years had passed since the Singer of Songs had come to mankind, and now he was about to return to the world and to lead his beloved into the land of grace. They painted images of the Singer's guitar on walls everywhere in the city, and revealed themselves to their neighbors and families because they proclaimed now was the time for those they loved to convert to their faith, seeing as how judgment day was at hand. To appease the people-and the old gods-the Concerned One and Cleander together ordered the execution of thousands of the El Bis sect. Rather than kill them for sport in the Field of Diversions or tie them to poles and make living torches of them, as previous emperors had done to other troublemakers on previous occasions, the Concerned One and his chamberlain impaled ten thousand of the followers of El Bis along the roadways leading into the city. For miles in every direction from Garden City, the City Guardsmen planted a victim every twenty paces. Crowds of jeering civilians journeyed out to watch the hated believers in the Singer of Songs slowly bleed to death and to mock them with taunts such as "Listen, the Singer is gone, but the song remains the same!" and "There will be no more dancing for you in hell!" Vendors brought carts filled with casks of beer and strips of barbequed meat so the crowds could purchase snacks while they watched their former neighbors perish. People said the ancient gods must have looked down approvingly upon this grotesque scene. As winter came on and cold weather returned to the high country around the capital, the diseases waned. By the beginning of the Concerned One's eleventh year in office they had disappeared altogether, though they had taken at least a third of Garden City's population with them into oblivion.
Father traveled to our villa hideaway every fortnight accompanied by two score of his sailors from Tampico. He was on each occasion happy to be away from what he called "the emperor's morgue." Being my father, he was equally anxious to return to Garden City and perform his duty. He told me during these visits that life in the palace had changed completely since we had been there in the aftermath of the rebellion in the Great Plains.
"Th
e palace has become the most luxurious athletic training camp in the world," he said. "The emperor rises before sunrise, boxes for an hour with that great oaf Norman, and bathes with that terrifying whore of his in a little tub of ice-cold water. For breakfast he has a bagel and half an apple-that's everything he eats before noon. The rest of the morning he does calisthenics among his muscle-headed chums, then he has a midday meal with them a pack of wild dogs wouldn't touch, and after he has a nap he practices his combat skills. I must say, the boy is handy with a fencer's sword, for an emperor, anyway. In the army he'd be a terror to every one of his comrades stationed around him. He doesn't have a clue of how a real soldier fires and defends in actual combat. You've seen him use a hunting rifle. Now, with that, he's as good as any man I've ever had under me, except he doesn't know when to stop shooting."
"The empire would be better off if Luke Anthony were a soldier serving under you, sir," I said.
"I couldn't afford to feed him in the army," said Father. "Not when he and his mates get down to a real meal; that's when they eat up more meat than a brigade of regulars in the field. They don't waste a lot of wood cooking it, either. Just cook it a little. Luke Anthony-excuse me, the Concerned One-he has these quacks from California around him giving out health advice; they tell him overcooking destroys the vital juices. He won't eat ordinary pork or mutton, no indeed. He and his chums eat predators: lions, leopards, jaguars, wild boar. The quacks told them the animals' strength goes straight into their bodies. There are a couple thousand merchants getting rich bringing the poor beasts to the palace right from South America and Africa. They bring each creature in to his kitchens, kill it, butcher it, and boil it up right on the spot. Blood and guts and everything. Then the emperor and his fellow idiots wolf it down, each of them holding a big chunk in his hands and gnawing on it like a bloody bunch of cavemen. It's the vilest thing I've ever seen, Justa."
"What are they doing about Cleander?" I asked him.
"Nothing I can see," said Father. "The emperor and his crowd keep to the interior gardens; they run, they spar, they take turns lifting big barbells over their heads. They gallivant about showing their bare chests and bare legs like they're woodland nymphs in some silly poem you might read. That nasty woman Marcie Angelica struts around wearing no more clothes than the men. She lifts and fights right alongside of them. Her arms have gotten so big they stick out from her sides like she's a heron forever spreading her wings. She's disgusting. You'll never lift barbells or walk around naked and such like that after I'm gone, will you, Justa?"
"Sir, I promise I will never lift great weights or parade about naked," I laughed. "Now, what about Cleander?"
"Strange to say," said Father, "he still has an official office in the palace, and comes in every day, though he does all his work inside that little adjoining place he keeps next door. The emperor is frightened out of his wits when he catches sight of him. Cleander strolls around the hallways, hands behind his back, most of the time moving without an escort. He wears these funny little driving slippers like the European swells used to have, so he doesn't make hardly a sound when he takes a step; he goes about piddy-pat, piddy-pat, like a cat sneaking through an alley, not a care in his heart. The emperor and his thick-necked friends scurry away like mice when they see him. An ambassador for another land would look at them and guess Cleander is the emperor and Luke Anthony and his bunch are some sort of entertainers rehearsing for a big show. A very odd place the palace is these days, Justa."
During his visits to our safe haven in the country Father enjoyed walking through the wide vineyards and seeing the grape clusters dangling from their weathered trellises. So many years had passed since he had left the family farm far to the north Father remembered next to nothing of horticulture. He could merely pretend to understand what the farmhands were doing as they busied themselves in the fields. "Well done, lad!" he would call out to some startled worker tending the crops. "He certainly can wield that farming whatyoucallit," commented Father in regards to the farming implement true sons of the soil call a hoe. I would tell him what I had read during the previous two weeks while he and I strolled arm in arm through the verdant furrows. He was content to listen and nod his head, though both he and I knew he understood less about science and philosophy than he did of farming.
Each time before he left the villa we would perform one of his fatuous Sophia rituals in a grove of sycamore and oak trees at the far end of the estate's fields. We put wildflowers and twigs from young saplings in our hair and were as lighthearted as the children of nature the goddess supposedly wants the whole of humanity to be. Father did not scold me if I softly laughed while he performed his singular skipping dance and twirled the rattle in his hand. Sophia-if she ever existed-seemed to smile upon our humble ceremonies, for she let Father be a happy man while he was with us in the cool, green hills and far from the cursed city.
Sometime during each visit Father would repeat to me the awful details of the wild animals the Concerned One ate. He told me in confidence there was nothing he had done in his career that distressed him more than to see the Mexican policemen carry into the palace one of those magnificent creatures in a tiny steel cage. He said when one of his men dispatched the trapped animal with a bullet to its head one could some times hear the beast's dying screams echoing off every wall in the emperor's maze of corridors.
"They slice them up, boil the pieces, and the emperor and his companions gobble them up like a bunch of noisy hogs at a slop trough," said Father, forgetting he had told me the same thing during a previous visit to the villa.
Father explained to me he purchased the more common fare the palace staff ate from a different dealer in the city's markets every week. Cleander's spies watched him from the streets as Father went shopping accompanied by two hundred men from the Imperial Navy. Because Father was careful never to frequent the same stalls on two consecutive occasions, Cleander's men never knew which food they should poison. It was during these expeditions to the various open-air markets, the places the common people of Garden City go to gossip, that Father gleaned from sundry merchants what the secret plan of Cleander's enemies was. As the cold weather began and the pox vanished from the city, the price of food should have fallen after the harvest from the Mexican countryside and the one from Texas arrived in the capital; instead the cost doubled during the first half of December. Father, as I have said before, was never the most cunning of men, yet he clearly perceived that the speculators were hoarding grain in their rural granaries to create an artificial shortage. The new commodities commissioner, Mr. Dion, put it about Garden City that Cleander had diverted a large portion of the grain shipments to his native southwestern Europe to combat a famine there. In the markets Father contacted several travelers who had recently been to Greece, and they informed him they had seen no evidence of famine in that portion of the continent.
Since Cleander had warned Father not to make contact with any of the speculators, I convinced Father to let me go in his place to speak to his financial patron Mr. Golden in the produce market next to the city's central plaza in order to sound him out on this matter. I found the unpleasant man, one of the wealthiest individuals in the entire Empire, seated in a tiny stall where he was cheating some poor soul out of a few dollars for a basket of rotten onions.
"You will eat and be strong," he was telling the wretch as I approached from the street side, and the fuel factor put a hand on his fat arm to show the truth of his promise.
The wretch paid at least four times what the onions were worth. Mr. Golden snickered as the fool walked away carrying a load so decayed the basket's underside was leaking. This fat patron of Father's, a man worth millions, glanced upward to thank the heavens for this opportunity to steal a few pennies from a dole recipient.
He and I had not met before that day. I had previously only seen him from afar at the spectacles in the Field of Diversions. Until I stepped before his place of business and pulled the light hood off my head he had never beheld me.
"Well, hello, beautiful," he said, and pursed his lips to make what he meant to be a complimentary expression. "One could quickly make a sizable fortune selling you. Exotic girls are very big this year among the smart set."
"That may be your business, sir," I said; "it isn't mine. I come to you to speak on behalf of my father, General Peter Black."
"Oh, so you're Black's Syrian bastard," he said, and clicked his tongue. "No wonder your old man keeps you under wraps. You have already made me a fortune, by the by. That dolt Titian paid me well to arrange a marriage with you. Could you stand sideways, girl?" he asked, and craned his neck beyond the edge of the stall so he could ogle my figure from the side. "No wonder you were fatal to him. I must say: you would be a lovely way to die. Worth every cent. My goodness, child; nature has lavished her gifts upon you! Were I younger, I would buy you for myself. Sad to say, only a little bit of you would kill me these days."
"I'm not for sale, sir," I told him.
"Everybody is for sale, sweetheart," said Mr. Golden. "Some just demand a higher price. Come around and into the back and tell me what your old warhorse of a daddy wants this time."
I was reluctant to enter an enclosed space with him. He had risen from his bench and started toward the rear of the stall while I remained upon the street.
"Oh, come, missy," he said to me over his shoulder. "You are safe here. See that man over there?" he asked, and pointed to an individual in a heavy long coat he wore buttoned tightly around his body on that warm winter day. "He has a couple assault rifles under there. So does that one, and that one, and him over there," he added, indicating three similarly dressed men. "I have eight men around the place to protect me from Cleander's thugs. We are hardly alone."
I went around the shop's front and into the house behind the shop; Mr. Golden had rented this space to several barefoot families who gaped at me as I hurried through their crowded front room. I had to exit the home to access the back of the produce shop, and there found Mr. Golden lowering his enormous frame onto a tiny stool. Beside him was a burning lamp shaped like a phallus. Looking about the semidarkened space he divided from the street with a sliding glass door I could see the shelves and ground around me were full of similar devices.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 17
