"My, my, my," he exclaimed, again clicking his tongue. "Let me have a look at you. My dear, I'll give you a thousand dollars cash, if you will just take off your gown for a few seconds. I won't even try to touch to you. Your skin, my precious fawn, is the same color as clover honey"
"Quit that, sir," I said. "I am not a whore you can talk to like that! I am here as my father's representative. He would come to you himself, but Cleander is watching him."
"Women in politics offends heaven," laughed the fat man. "What would please the gods, both old and new and those beyond our imagining, is you naked and bent over my sofa. Oh, yes." (He ran his tongue over his upper lip as he pondered the image he had created in his mind.) "You have one of those pretty heads spoiled by higher notions, don't you, honey? I expect your by-the-book father is to blame for that. Rules and standards and such. So tell me, darling, what is bothering the old soldier these days?"
"He has heard the phony story you and your comrades are spreading concerning the famine in Greece," I said. "He wonders why you think anyone would believe the chamberlain would take the risk of transferring food to his homeland. Merchants arrive in Garden City from that part of Europe every week. You can't keep saying there is a famine there when those who have been there will say there isn't."
"The people already think the worst about Cleander," said the fuel factor. "They want to think he's sending food to his homeland and starving Garden City. As for the merchants, the ones telling stories, we in the city's business world can hire other merchants to say there is a famine over there. We will cause one if we have to. We only need time. The day is coming when the people will demand Cleander's head. Wait till they get really hungry.
"Why don't you have a chair, pretty one?"
"I won't be staying long," I said, although I did not see where one could have sat among his hundreds of little suggestive sculptures. "What if the chamberlain arrests you and your friends before the people revolt?"
"As long as the emperor lives," said Mr. Golden, "Cleander cannot strike at us. Not openly, anyway. He cannot send his division of City Guardsmen into the palace after the emperor for fear of causing a civil war. The armies up north in the Pan-Polarian heartland would march on the capital in that instance. Your father's job, his only job, is to keep the young emperor alive until the spring comes. The fate of the Empire rests upon those old shoulders of his."
He bent the upper half of his body toward me and sniffed at my person like a nosy dog checking out a female of its species.
"You smell good, too," he said, and closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, smiling at the same time as if he were transported to new places of delight. "Like a flower, or better. Some women use-I don't know how you little curies say it-they use these little deceits under their outer clothing to give themselves that delightful liquid movement. I can tell from how your dress clings to you, my love, you are entirely true. Are you wearing any underclothes, darling?"
"I am a general's daughter, sir!" I told the fat man. "Your remarks are extremely disrespectful!"
He thought my objection to his crude behavior was beyond amusing. He sat on his tiny stool like a fat frog on an undersized lily pad and laughed at me. He laughed until his flabby sides hurt, and he had to pat his ribs with his short, pudgy arms to assuage the pain.
"We in the market know you are a family of honor," he chuckled. "That is why we wanted old Black for this job. He is the one man we know of who still cares about the old formalities, the old codes of behavior. You are much like him, pretty one."
"I am?" I said, momentarily startled because I never thought of myself and Father as being in any way alike. "What would you and your kind know of honor, sir?" I said upon recovering my wits.
"Nothing," he allowed. "But we know where General Black's gorgeous bastard daughter and the rest of his family are. That is everything we need to know."
"And if Cleander gets to the emperor in a roundabout fashion?" I asked. "What if he kills the Concerned One?"
"Then he wins the game," conceded Mr. Golden, and very nearly frowned. "When one plays, there is always the chance one can run up against a better player. We in the market are doing everything we can. Your father has to do his part. We ask no more of him than that."
I bowed to him, though he did not deserve the gesture, and turned to go.
"Oh, my," I heard him call after me. "I had not yet seen this side of you, love. You have been literally sitting on a treasure all your life, pretty one. Would five thousand dollars change your mind? Just lift your skirts a little so I can see!"
I turned and backed into the private home as he laughed at my modesty.
Among the few visitors the emperor allowed into his gardens was an acting troupe who daily entertained the Concerned One and his friends now that there were no more electronic devices to divert them. For those who have never been to the capital I should explain that except for the lavish inner gardens, the throne room, and the banquet chambers, the grand palace built by Darko a century and a half earlier and slightly enlarged by each of his successors is a patchwork of hundreds of smaller rooms the long hallways bind together into a two-mile-long structure. Some of these rooms are kitchens or storage spaces, and others are the living quarters of the palace staff. In each room, no matter how small, there is a recess in one of the four walls and therein is placed a stone bust of someone of great import to Pan-Polarian history. In the Concerned One's time most of these small statues were of the Concerned One himself. Several factories of artisans employing a couple thousand workers existed for the sole purpose of creating new works of art that featured the Concerned One as military hero, athlete, or hunter. One could guess the importance of a palace resident by gauging the splendor of the statue of the emperor in his room. The actors had in their rehearsal suite a magnificent onyx statue of the Concerned One in the guise of Mercury, the ancient winged messenger, which they proudly carried before them when they paraded through the long hallways on their way to a performance. When Father's policemen saw the statue coming toward them, they stepped aside and let the actors pass into the Concerned One's presence. Father was not as lenient as his men were. He always counted each actor and never let any of them come within ten paces of the emperor's person.
During the Concerned One's rest period, when the emperor and his friends ceased training for an hour or so, the actors re-created scenes from the life of Tom Sawyer, the emperor's favorite character in classical literature. The troupe re-created the whitewashing of the fence, the day Tom met Huckleberry Finn on the lower Mississippi, the pair's travels in the Wild West, et cetera. Father recounted to me that the presentation of the time young Becky kissed Tom on the cheek was entertaining but the troupe had made the scene indecent. The actress playing the part of the young girl was, he confessed to me one day at the villa, quite comely.
"She was, as you say, pretty in an actress's way," he told me, and blushed.
"You have long had a keen eye for the ladies, sir," I teased him. "What exactly was she wearing that was so indecent when she kissed Tom?"
"She wore little before and less afterward," said Father. "I had to close my eyes and think of Sophia till she had left the area."
On the afternoon the actors performed the story of Tom joining Huck on the river, Father espied the actor cast as Jim drifting to the rear of the garden after he had delivered his lines. While the emperor and his entourage were watching the two young actors left on the stage discussing their return to Missouri, Father observed that `Jim" had disappeared among the columns of the garden's peristyle. Father took two sailors and quickly circled the perimeter of the garden and ran into the hallway the actor would have had to have entered. The man had made some excuse to the guards standing watch there and had walked a hundred paces into the corridor by the time Father and his two men overtook him.
"You there, come back here!" Father called to the actor. "This place is off limits to you!"
"I'm sorry, my lord," the man said, and strolled toward Father a
nd the two sailors turned security guards. "I have to relieve myself. I did not know-"
"The kitchens are back this way," said Father. "One of the lads here will take you to the bathroom. You will not be harmed, sir, but procedure demands we search you."
The actor had swallowed hard at Father's pronouncement.
"My lord, I am an actor," he said, and forced a laugh. "I have to return to the play."
"We will work quickly," said Father. "Only take a moment of your time."
The actor stepped back from Father. The two Guardsmen slipped behind him, cutting off a possible escape route.
"My kind lord," pled the actor, and backed against the wall, "I am a poor man. I have children. You can ask the others about me. I have never once before been in trouble."
"I'm sorry," said Father. "We have to take care. You were straying too close to the emperor's food."
The guards in unison took a step toward the man. Father told me later the actor breathed out heavily and slumped his shoulders. The life force, said Father, seemed to pass out of him into the confined air of the hallway.
"They said they would murder my kids if I talked," he said.
Father pitied the trapped man in spite of the loathsome profession he followed on the stage. Were they in his camp in Turkey, Father told himself, he would let the man go home to his family.
"Who is-?" Father began.
He was about to ask who was the "they" the man referred to, but the actor had taken a packet from the folds of his tattered stage costume and had tossed some white powder into his mouth.
"Stop him!" Father ordered the sailors.
They moved too slowly. By the time they seized him the actor had already consumed the powder. The guards attempted to force open his mouth as the actor slipped to the tiled floor and went into convulsions.
"Back away!" Father told his men. "Give him room!"
The dying man bounced about the marble floor like an eel on a fisherman's boat. The powder he had taken worked quickly; in a few heartbeats he was still. Father knelt beside the body and closed the man's eyes. The priests of Sophia had taught the general the dead want to look from this world to paradise as quickly as possible.
"What was it, sir? asked one of the guards.
"Something Cleander's men gave him to put in the emperor's meal," said Father. "Round up the other actors. Find out this one's name and where he lived. Cleander might not yet know he is dead. If we hurry, we might get to his home before they do."
The other actors said the failed assassin dwelt in a tenement in the rancid slums lying beyond the produce markets. Father led twenty men posthaste into that portion of the city. They knew they had not moved as quickly as they should have when they arrived at the late actor's flat and found the door smashed to splinters: the ever watchful Cleander had sent someone there already, perhaps before the actor had fallen dead in the emperor's hallway. The few bits of furniture inside the apartment had been pushed to the walls, leaving an open area in the middle of the flat in which Cleander's thugs had left the actor's wife and her four children lying in a tidy row, the woman at the left end of the line and the smallest child on the right. After they had shot them, their killers had pushed the stiffening muscles of their faces into gruesome smiles. With the family's blood, one of the murderers had written on the apartment's wall: "Next time, Black Zero."
When he became an old man, Father's heart became too tender to suit an emperor or to do an emperor's work. He regretted the actor's suicide; the murdered children made him grieve for the whole decaying world for weeks afterward. He took the dead family to the wasteland beyond the city and buried them in a spot beside the only bush he could find in that place Garden City dumps her garbage and lets the wild dogs and the mentally defective scavenge for scraps. He prayed to his goddess that these, the least of the city's residents, be received as kings in the next world. As soon as the ground had accepted the dead, Father sent word to his legitimate family members that they should leave the city and go to the estate of a relative far to the north. He also dispatched twelve sailors to carry a message to Helen and me, ordering us to take the money the men were carrying with them and buy our passage back to Turkey by way of Guatemala. His letter read:
"Cleander's men are swarming over the road to Tampico. You and your maid must leave via the south.
"Should I not see you again, Justa, you must go to a moneylender named Samuel Van Coons in the port of Amsterdam. He is keeping some money I set aside for you when I made my first agreement with Mr. Golden. Show him your silver ring to let him know who you are. The money will suffice to provide you with a comfortable life, or it will make a handsome dowry, should you heed my wishes for once in the course of your lifetime and choose to marry.
"You go with my love,
"Your father."
I defied his orders. Helen and I returned with the twelve sailors to the palace. Father was furious with me-or so he pretended to be-upon beholding us in the eerily blank white hallways in the company of his men. I knew he was embarrassed to meet me so soon after he had used the taboo words "father" and "love" in his letter to me. In his aged heart I knew he also feared being alone in the enormous palace, surrounded by scoundrels and lunatics. While he would never admit to it, he was pleased to have me there. Good form demanded he give me a dressing down in front of his men; he told me I was a disobedient child, that women had no business butting into men's business, and told me how abashed he was to have these, the men in his command, know what a rebellious child he had raised. Then he gave Helen and me the servant's room next door to the quarters he and Medus were using. In that small space we set up a modest but sane home for him, an island on which Father could find refuge on the expansive palace grounds that elsewhere contained almost no modesty or sanity. Within five days of our arrival Father had forgotten he meant to be angry at me. He let himself slip back into the habit of letting me prepare meals for him in our private quarters and allowing me to read to him as I always did while we were in the East.
"Justa," he told me one day while I was reading his correspondence to him, "you are not my ideal of a daughter, but you are a very good soldier. You have put yourself in grave danger here. I expect you know that. You can't carry a rifle, so I'll make you my chief of personal logistics, something like that."
I bent over his bald pate and kissed the crown of his head.
"Don't confuse the issue with your womanly kisses," he warned me.
"Daughters may vex their parents; soldiers must follow a commander's orders. You are not to leave these two rooms during the daylight hours unless you are certain the emperor is exercising in his gardens, which he will be doing nearly all the waking hours. Stay away from the inner chambers, always. You can't let the Concerned One or any of his crazy friends see you. Never, not ever, can you leave these two rooms during the night. That's when the young emperor goes about wandering. There will be these corrupt policeman chaps everywhere to protect him. Everyone, even you, will have to stay out of their way."
I said I would endeavor to do as he wished. It was a solid testimony to my love for him that during my stay in that madhouse I usually did. My sense of duty to Father was assisted by the constricted circumstances in what was in fact a besieged fortress; heavily armed men of both the Concerned One's and Cleander's factions were everywhere on the palace grounds, and my rebel spirit had scant opportunity to do as it would in such a strange situation.
From my servant's room in the east wing I could see the grand Christian church the Conquistadors had built in what they called the capital of New Spain; it was a surprisingly conventional building-when compared to the palace-in spite of the church's soaring spires and exotic stainedglass windows, for it had a single roof over a single large chamber. The Concerned One shunned everything that bore the memory of far grander times, and he had let the former cathedral become a barracks for a company of City Guardsmen. As Cleander and the emperor had both intimated to Father, these men had taken the chamberlain's coin
and were on his side during this long wait for the standoff between Cleander and the speculators to break. Unlike the catch-as-catch-can soldiers my father commanded on the frontier, where men dressed in rusted body armor and khaki uniforms that were made locally, the City Guardsmen loitering around the palace's perimeter and the policemen within the walls were resplendent in their molded breastplates, bright red topcoats, and shining gilded helmets. The fighting ability of both groups of armed men was questionable. What they were undoubtedly good at was presenting themselves; indeed, they were the best troops in the Empire when it came to making a display on a parade ground. During the long standoff we were to endure that winter both sides expended their energies tramping double-time in tight formation through the hallways or around the exterior walls. The City Guardsmen-the more numerous of the two armed camps-were the first to start these daily exhibitions, which they no doubt thought would frighten our men. Our men responded with similar demonstrations, using the multicolored banners the emperor had given them to show how serious we were. As days passed and both sides became accustomed to seeing their potential opponents on the march, the daily parades became a competition to put on the better show. If the City Guardsmen went double-time around the palace, the policemen ran triple-time through the hallways and gardens. When I looked down on the procession from my high window, the men resembled a giant centipede as they rambled past the open-air ponds and colonnades. After the policemen put the brightly dressed athlete friends of the emperor in their vanguard, the City Guardsmen hired acrobats to tumble before them as they advanced. To top this the policemen hired a marching band to lead their daily parades and drew after them the emperor's golden carriage. The City Guardsmen then dressed Ethiopian immigrants in chains as they would dress captured enemy soldiers and disguised exotic dancers as hundreds of Miss Liberties, and while they pulled the former along behind their formations, the latter skipped ahead of the City Guardsmen, tossing rose petals onto their pathway.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 18
