"When Huck pretended to be dead," said the emperor, much perturbed the senator did not know the story. "Have you not read the account written by Mr. Clemens?" he asked.
"I am very old. Many years have escaped me since I read of you in school. I had forgotten...," said Senator Coppola.
He started to sit down, then quickly stood upright again.
"May I seat myself, my lord?" he asked.
The emperor allowed he might, but from that moment forward Coppola and the other people of the Empire would have to prostrate themselves whenever they were in the emperor's vicinity.
"I am a god now," he said. "The god, if one wants to quibble over titles. Gods have to be shown proper respect by you chaps who are someday going to be rotting corpses."
He paused to adjust his shorts, a garment that, much to the discomfort of the senators in the front rows, kept riding up on his beefy legs.
"Else I will have to destroy you," the emperor said. "I don't want to. Don't care if I do, either. The matter is entirely up to you. I am disconnected from your concerns."
He rose from his throne, and every senator fell upon his face in response. The emperor remembered something as he went toward the exit and returned to the throne platform to say, "I nearly forgot to tell you: there are going to be some big changes happening in your world soon."
The senators cautiously reseated themselves and listened.
"For instance," said the emperor, "Garden City is no more. No one can use that name any longer, unless he is referring to past events. You are currently living in the Mausoleum of the Concerned One, which I have named in honor of my former incarnation. I want the road signs, the coins, the rest of the what-you-call-thems changed as soon as you can manage it to reflect the city's new designation. I realize you are mortals and cannot do these things as quickly as I would want. You should also realize I can be a wrathful god when I am disappointed. Should you tarry at this assignment, I may have to take action to speed you at your task. Remember my history in the guise of the mighty Hercules: I have slain my own wife and children. Do you think I would hesitate to kill a roomful of old men?"
The signs were altered and new coins were minted two days later.
As he had told Father during our previous visit to the capital, the emperor/god had discovered Drummond's book upon the first twelve rulers of the Pan-Polarian Empire; the actions of his predecessors recorded therein had given the emperor countless new notions of governance. He would sit upon a balcony in the palace, killing flies for hours on end as his predecessor Timor had done, although the earlier emperor had used an energy ray to perform the deed and the man born Luke Anthony only had a prosaic swatter. The Emperors John and Juno had once had months of the years named after them, so the emperor/god who used to be the Concerned One renamed the entire year after his honorific titles: the Wild One, Lucky, Pius, Luke, Windy, Glistening, Canadian, Holy, Hercules, Roman, Trusting, and the Expected One replaced the traditional names of the twelve months. (The name of the last month became the title by which the emperor most often wanted to be addressed.) Because he had read how the emperor Cepheus had practiced every form of sexual depravity, the current emperor did him one better by keeping hundreds of young men in the palace whom he dressed in women's clothing and named after male and female body parts. He delighted in offending important visitors to the palace by kissing and fondling his peculiar new companions whenever he knew his guests would be watching. When he reread of how Darko had failed to fight the huge conflagration in the old capital city of Washington, the emperor was inspired to commit a still larger crime: he ordered the City Guardsmen to set the city ablaze and to protect only the palace and other public buildings. The flames they set destroyed most of central Garden City, some of which was centuries old. The former Christian church once known as the National Cathedral burned to ashes. The sacred Bell of Liberty, the most hallowed object in the Empire, was melted into a lump of bronze when the museum it was in was set aflame. The fire likewise destroyed the beautiful Temple of Peace, which many said was a sign that the Empire would never again know serene times and was also an incident that caused other citizens to ask why the Pan-Polarians had ever bothered to build a temple dedicated to peace. The emperor claimed the black wasteland the fire left in the heart of the city was now imperial property, and he proclaimed a day of thanksgiving because he had been given the chance to build a city worthy of himself.
"Now you will have more than a stadium to remember me by when I have ascended again onto Olympus," he told the Senate on a day he was dressed in his Hercules outfit.
On that same occasion he assured the senators they need not worry much about the homeless families the holocaust might have created; he had ordered the City Guardsmen to set the fires at night while the affected people were sleeping, and so most of the potentially dislocated had perished along with their homes.
"You are fortunate I think of these little details," the emperor told them.
The Concerned One-I still called him that in spite of his new titles-rarely spoke to the citizens not part of the government. He let Marcie go to the common people for him. On the occasion of one of her speeches she rode through the streets dressed as a warrior from some earlier age and astraddle an enormous black charger from which she proclaimed to the spectacle-hungry folk what glorious plans the emperor had for them. The tall, awe-inspiring concubine told them there would not only be public work projects to reconstruct the center of the city, there would be more athletic shows, and everyone would have double their usual dole allotments, simply because the emperor was so very fond of his people. She was an uncommonly good speaker for one of her background. She used short words the people understood, and she was loud. The people came to love the tall woman in a blonde wig, a woman they, like the emperor, now called "the Amazon"; they perhaps loved her more than they loved the emperor himself, as she was one of them, and was even more abusive of the wealthy than the Concerned One was. Rich and noble citizens despised her with a fury equal to the commoners' love. Marcie was lowborn, a woman and a whore, and she had the power to issue claims upon property and to kill anyone objecting to her methods. "See how they quiver before a woman!" she would proclaim from the back of her dreaded horse when she was preparing to pounce upon another victim. Once whatever prey she had selected was dead, she would use the same black horse to drag the dead man's body over the pavement, and she would ask the people, "What good are his titles today? Who now cares what the name of his great-grandfather was? Look at him: yesterday he had two hundred servants to bathe and feed him; today he is fed to us." Her supporters painted images of her on thousands of city walls; always they depicted her as the triumphant Hippolyte, the mythical queen of the Amazons, about to gut another cowering rich man. Other scribblers working under the cover of night would write "whore" or "murderer" underneath her pictures.
Garden City's graffiti artists were less kind to Marcie's consort, for many among them hated him for his corrupt government and for his lack of dignity and for his failure to respond to the destruction of our technolo gies and because-and I will put the matter in writing as delicately as I can-the Concerned One had developed a singular physical problem that made even him more ridiculous than he had been before. A certain embarrassing swelling (embarrassing to everyone else, but not to the emperor) had arisen in the area of the emperor's groin. No one had noted this peculiar growth while the Concerned One still wore his purple emperor's suits; when he went about dressed in the scanty fur kilt of Hercules or in Tom Sawyer's denim shorts, the condition was obvious to all who beheld him. On the occasion I first looked upon him after our return to Garden City, Helen and I were seated across from the imperial box in the Field of Diversions and from a considerable distance we could see more of the emperor's unseemly growth than any sane person would have wanted to behold. One of his matronly admirers near us blurted out, "He is the greatest man in the world! See how happy he is to look over the thousands of pretty girls he rules!" The fool woman had no
idea what she was seeing. Something terrible had befallen the once achingly handsome son of Mathias; his face had reddened, and the tip of his nose had become bulbous since the time of Cleander's death. While he retained his massive, powerful figure, he no longer moved with his old speed when he fenced with his mates, and his skin was developing a rash that would slowly turn into clusters of open pustules. The graffiti artists drew obscene representations of the stricken emperor-most of which I cannot describe without sounding as puerile as the artists were-on the clean white walls of every new building the Concerned One erected. Even the supposedly sacred new Temple of Peace hosted grotesque caricatures of him. The joke among the irreverent scribblers in the city was that because of their pictures the Concerned One was truly building something for which he would be forever remembered.
The emperor/god forgot to welcome Father to the city for weeks after our arrival via Tampico. We learned immediately after we made port that the Concerned One had called the other leading men from the provinces into the capital, and was too busy harassing them to bother with Father at that time. While he was both evil and insane, the emperor must have had a few lucid moments when he recalled that Father had twice saved his useless life. I believe within his fevered mind there was a compartment that held Father to be a handy old patriot he could summon to duty in the most dangerous instances. As for the other generals, the Concerned One imagined they were constantly plotting against him. Some of them of course were, which to the Concerned One justified the threats and the occasional death sentences he apportioned to some of his other commanders. We in Father's household were meanwhile yet again left hanging in Garden City. Father had no official duties, and we had no inkling of whether he would be accepted as a friend or a foe when the emperor at last summoned him to the palace.
We did, as I have said, see the emperor from afar at the arena soon after our return from the East. On the occasion of the memorable Winter Festival games of that year the Concerned One fought as a modern gladiator against a man given a wooden sword to use against the emperor's steel one. The Concerned One had previously slain wild animals in athletic exhibitions on other occasions. This combat against humans was an innovation in his history of disgraceful conduct. Hunting is noble-or so most important men hold it to be so-but fighting other men for money is not. Crowds on the day of the emperor's fight filled the gigantic stadium to overflow capacity. For months before word had gone throughout what was left of the Empire that the Concerned One would debase himself in this fashion, and most of the citizens were eager to see him do so. The lower classes cheered the titled fool as he entered the arena in his golden armor; they threw fistfuls of carnations on him when he took a preliminary lap around the interior wall separating the adoring populace from the bloody artificial turf. The commoners screamed like a whole army of drunken Russians when the emperor commenced to whacking away at this opponent's wooden weapon with his metal blade. The sight offended the senators and governmental officials in attendance, but they too raised their hands and cheered because Marcie and a host of City Guardsmen were watching them to ascertain who among their number were not completely delighted. At the contest's end, the Concerned One spared his opponent's life after he had hacked only a few nasty gashes in the unlucky gladiator's chest and face. For this victory, the professional athletes' guild awarded the emperor a bag of gold double-eagle coins that he brandished about the arena for everyone to see. The people clapped themselves to exhaustion in response to his heroism. Then, contrary to the normal order of convict matches followed by wild animal slaughter followed by athletic matches, the emperor's friends fought some matches against each other. It is a curious thing to recount, since this was the blood-soaked Field of Diversions we were in, yet none of the contestants in these fights of the Winter Games were really injured, as the contestants were-as they proudly shouted to the crowd before each mock duel-the emperor's companions and were above getting hurt. These favored athletes pulled their blows and put on great displays of false agony when anyone's weapon came within an arm's length of anyone else. They broke open packets of pig's blood to simulate wounds when they felt wounds were needed, and the crowd pretended to love their efforts. Everyone cheered and applauded as loudly as they had for the Concerned One. I wondered if any of the 180,000 present thought it ironic that in an era when almost no one else was safe, paid combatants fighting in the Field of Diversions were not injured by so much as a splinter in one of their fingers. The finale of the games was a shooting exhibition performed by the Concerned One and selected marksmen from within his circle. From the safety of the elevated walkway the emperor had used at previous shows, they shot dead a beautiful orange-and-black tiger imported from India, several tall birds, some wild goats that were as graceful as swifts when they frantically leapt in vain against the high arena walls, and lastly they shot a huge, leathery rhinoceros of a sort I had not seen before. (Some said it was an African unicorn, a description that only demonstrates how far Africa is from the glorious realms of mythology.) The emperor shot this last beast seven times and failed to kill it. The great wrinkly thing merely became more enraged the more he wounded it, until it became so angry it charged the carbon filament supports holding up the elevated ramp. The mighty creature bent one vertical beam cleanly in half, sending the emperor onto his imperial backside. The African "unicorn" might have torn the entire edifice down and trampled the Concerned One into the green plastic grass but for a squadron of City Guardsmen who charged into the arena and emptied their assault rifles into the furious animal. Hundreds of rounds were needed to send the beast from this world, and thirty Guardsmen were necessary to drag it to the center of the field, where the emperor/god posed with a foot propped atop his vanquished prey. Everyone declared aloud they had never seen a braver man than he. They screamed for a half an hour as he strutted about the enclosed battleground in his Hercules outfit. Women exposed their breasts to him in hopes of making his eyes linger on them an additional second. Poor men threw the last coins in their purses at the emperor's feet. (The Concerned One or someone in his circle had foreseen the possibility of this transpiring, and small boys were present to dash onto the turf and gather up the coins for the emperor's treasury.) Senators lowered their faces onto the concrete, swearing as they debased themselves that they were overawed by the emperor/god. My father the general missed all of this. During the first sword fight he had put a wet cloth over his head and had gone to sleep in the warm sunshine. The shouting of his neighbors covered the loud snoring he did while the emperor moved from victory to greater victory on the green surface below the towering grandstands. Father awoke upon hearing the trumpet call announcing the end of the spectacles. He declared to his legal wife the outing had exhausted him and he needed to go home and take a nap.
When someone in the palace at last remembered Father was in the city, a messenger brought the general a summons to meet with the emperor on the following afternoon. Since the heart of the city remained mostly windblown ashes, Father had to walk across a black wasteland to get to his interview. The remains of that man-made disaster turned Father's pristine white officer's uniform to a shade of dirty gray miles before he could reach the palace gateway. Yet he should not have bothered making the grim journey, as Father soon learned the trip would be for naught. The emperor/god's mortal parts were ill that day, and he was receiving no one. In a corridor near the emperor's living quarters Father did meet Marcie. She demanded to know who this dusty old man wandering about the home of a god was.
"We have met before, madam," he said. "I am General Peter Black, the governor of Turkey."
"Oh," she said, disappointed because he was not someone there to be executed, "the old Nestor."
"Pardon, madam?" said Father.
"Nestor, you dunce," she said. "You know: the elderly chap in the Greek book about Troy. He lived in the past, didn't he? The emperor calls you that."
"He summoned me," said Father.
"He won't be seeing anyone for a while," said Marcie. "
Don't worry. He has no grievance against you. He likes you. It's the other army rats he is going to come down on. Some of those bastards will be a head shorter before this is over."
"Before what is over, madam?" asked Father.
"The transformation of the city, the blossoming of the earthly paradise, and the rest of it," she said, and pointed this way and that to show she was speaking of something that involved all of creation. "You should keep up with current events."
"Do you know why I am in Garden City?"
"In the Mausoleum of the Concerned One," she corrected him.
"Recalled from Turkey," suggested Father, for he could not force himself to say the absurd new name Luke Anthony had given the capital.
"He wants everyone of importance to remain in the Mausoleum of the Concerned One," she said. "They cannot conspire against him while they're right under his nose."
She told him to go home. The emperor would summon him again when he was feeling better. While he waited day after empty day for that interview to happen, Father learned he scarcely knew his legitimate wife after his many years of absence. While they lived together in the small house in the Field of Heroes, Father found their relationship had fared better when he was dwelling under a roof in distant Asia or in some other residence that was not near the capital. He awoke in the mornings to find her staring in disgust at his sun-blackened face and his gnarled soldier's hands. When she spoke to him during the daylight hours, she often as not reminded him of how much nobler her family had been than his before they two were married.
During the afternoon his wife would have her women friends over to gossip and sew floral designs on their clothing, flowers being the traditional symbols of Pan-Polarian nobility. If Father lingered there, the women sat in the front room staring in his direction, as if awaiting him to spring upon them like a wild beast. His wife's friends thought Father a vulgar rube on account of his coarse dining habits, for he was a soldier and soldiers must eat quickly when they have the opportunity. The same women thought he might be a foreigner because he pronounced his vs as though they were b s and elided his vowels; the society women asked (in not particularly polite fashion) if he had been reared in the Middle East since he spoke such terrible English.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 22
