Kalpa Imperial

by LAngelica Gorodischer, Ursula K. Le Guin

  But the next day, my friends, to the amazement and maybe the scandal and certainly the dread of all the villagers, Bib left his hut and walked to the ruins and without asking anybody’s leave entered the great doorways and was lost in the shadows, as if swallowed up by Fear. He came back in the evening, carrying a load so heavy that he staggered at every step, went into his fragile, windowless hut, gave his mother a lot of queer, shining things, and told her to use them. She had no idea what they were for.

  “This one’s for putting food in, and it won’t ever break,” Bib told her. “See? I hit it and it doesn’t break into bits like earthenware. The best bowls, even the ones Lloba makes, get broken, or they crack and let the soup run out. Not this one. Don’t be scared, nothing will happen if we use these things. This one’s for stirring with; don’t use a hollowed-out stick any more, this is better, and it won’t break or rot, either. . . . You could put this one on the fire for cooking soup or meat, but you’d better keep water in it, because it gets too hot and it might burn you. . . . This one’s for cutting leather: you put a finger here, and one here, and spread out the leather with the other hand, and do it like this. . . . This one’s to reflect the sun—no, not there, you have to hold it here, and that side faces up. Don’t drop it. It does break. Magic? Why? Those are just our faces, yours and mine. All right, we can put it down like this and it won’t reflect anything. . . . This one’s for keeping things in, but it’s better than a bag because you can keep things separate, arrowheads here, fishhooks here, knives here, feathers here, and this big part down below for winter clothes. . . . This is to sit on, or you can stand on it and reach the lower branches of trees. . . . This is for holding meat when you want to cut it, see? And this is for you to put around your neck instead of that string of yellow bones Voro gave you.”

  “But they’re from animals he killed hunting, before you were born,” said his mother.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Bib said. “They’re ugly, they’re just old dry bones. This is harder, and prettier, and it shines in the light—see?”

  And Bib went on explaining to her what each thing he’d brought back was for. Meanwhile, outside, the oldest and bravest and smartest men of the tribe were talking about what the boy had done. Around nightfall, one of them left the group, came to Bib’s hut, and called to him.

  “I’m here,” Bib said, appearing in the doorway.

  “Bib son of Voro,” said the man, “what you have done is evil.”

  “Why don’t you go to bed, old man?” said Bib.

  The man was outraged: “You’re going to die, Bib!” he shouted. “We’re going to burn your house and roast you inside it with your mother and all those accursed things!”

  “Don’t be stupid,” the boy said, smiling.

  The man went on shouting, he opened his arms and hurled himself at Bib, but he never reached him. Bib raised his right hand and in that hand was a little, shiny weapon. Bib fired and the man fell dead.

  Nobody else said anything about killing the son of Voro or burning his house full of things taken from the ruins. The villagers went right on believing that Fear dwelt there, but they’d rather face it than Bib’s weapon. That was why they agreed to let him divide them into groups and take them off to excavate the ruins every day, after they’d tended to the animals and the little children and the sick. Gone were the days when they had to get permission to enter the ruined palaces seeking the point of an iron grille to replace a lance-head. Gone too were the times of fear, though they didn’t know it and would have denied it. Though it’s true that they refused to rebuild the apartments and move into them, and that Bib couldn’t convince them that they’d live better and more safely there, it’s also true that under the boy’s direction they hauled loose stones, fallen beams, and rusted grillwork, and used them to build themselves new houses with solid walls and roofs, proper doors and windows and interior partitions.

  But Bib didn’t let them touch the biggest of the ruined buildings: “That’s my house,” he said. “Some day I’m going to live there.”

  The men and women of his tribe told him not to, the demons of darkness would appear in the night and carry him off. Bib laughed because he knew there were no demons of darkness. They no longer threatened him.

  Well, well, where’s all this leading us? You’ll soon see, my good friends, you’ll soon see: it leads to something farther along in time, when all the villagers lived in stone houses and ate off gold plates and served water in crystal jugs, some of them blackened, others cracked or with a broken lip, and in silver vases or cups, on carved tables which had been carefully cleaned and sanded. And they slept in beds which were missing the headboard or a post or a leg, with old cloaks laid over the straps, but real beds, wide and long, that filled the back rooms of the stone houses. The old people never got used to such things and just as they sometimes asked for their old clay bowls to eat from, so they sometimes secretly slept on the floor beside the big beds. But Bib said that powerful, valiant people slept in beds, not on the ground like the animals that serve only to provide work and food for their masters; and the young people and children liked feeling powerful and valiant.

  And so when winter came the men had finished building a wall that surrounded the new houses, the animal pens, the granaries and the ruins of Fear. The wall was gated and locked, with a great iron door that had taken them a month to carry and set in place. So when snow and hunger drove other tribes to seek food, attacking, killing, stealing, Bib’s people resisted them. They chased down the surviving assailants and brought some of them into the stone city. Nobody knew it, not even the son of Voro knew it, but the Empire was being reborn.

  Winter passed, spring came and passed, summer came; the stone city was changing fast, growing. They had to knock down part of the wall and rebuild it much farther out. Among the ruins were flat stones they used to pave the walkways between houses, and when they ran out of stones from the ruins they went looking for more in other ruins or natural quarries. It became necessary to construct landings on the river, and to cut wood into boards and fit them together into big boats instead of hollowing out logs to make canoes. It became necessary to bring more stones to erect more houses, and to clear the central place so that people could meet there to exchange what they made or harvested. Somebody made a circular platter turned by the pressure of a foot on a lever, put clay on it, and in a few moments shaped a vessel to contain liquids. A woman who had a sick child who couldn’t walk took two of the rollers they used to drag the flat stones over the ground and put a platform on them so the child could be moved. A man with a big family built up the walls of his house and added an upper floor and an inside staircase. The young people sat under the trees with the old people and asked what were the delicate, rare tools they kept finding in the ruins, what were they used for. Sometimes the old folks knew, sometimes they didn’t, and then the young ones found out for themselves by trying, hurting themselves, getting it wrong, and starting over. Protected and sheltered, well fed, safe from enemies and wild animals, the population of the city grew in number and in strength. What’s more, by the rainy season the people who came to them weren’t attacking, but came looking for refuge or for work or to offer what they made and what they knew. And when the rains ended and the fields turned deep green and men and women were harvesting grain and fruit, something very important happened.

  The young man they still called Bib really did want to go live in the big stone house in the ruins, because the dreams he’d dreamed as a child and the thoughts he’d thought as he grew to manhood were all still there, still alive within those walls, which in his eyes loomed ever grander. Not much was left of the other ruins of Fear, since everything that had been there, buried or not, was being used for living or for building in the city. Only the great central edifice stood as before; and there Bib worked, paving the ground with flagstones or uncovering the old faded tiling, setting beams in place to support upper floors, repairing, reinforcing walls and lintels, studying and tryi
ng to guess the purpose of the pipes of soft metal that stuck out between the joints of the stones.

  In that big house, in a room shut off by its fallen ceiling, one day toward the end of summer Bib came upon a gigantic chair, heavy as a mountain. It shone like the dishes he’d brought to his mother on his first day of manhood, and was covered with hard beads like those on the necklace that she’d worn since then instead of the string of teeth from animals Voro had killed in a long-ago winter before he was born. The chair was so high, so imposing, so solid, so tremendous, that it scarcely seemed made for a man. Bib thought it might be for a giant. He also thought he was a giant. Certainly not in body: Bib was still a weak little man, not very tall. Yet he thought himself a giant, and the chair was made for him. He climbed the three steps of its base and seated himself on it. Alone, in the ruined place, in almost total darkness since light entered only through the hole the son of Voro had made in the ceiling that had fallen across the old doorway, there he sat, a bold, inquisitive, disobedient barbarian, on the Golden Throne of the Lords of the Empire.

  Well, you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that once he’d sat in the seat of power, Bib became a giant. No, my friends, I don’t mean that he grew taller or fatter. He was just as he had been, smaller and shorter than most men of his age, but he thought intensely of himself not as an isolated person but as part of something that no longer existed and that needed him in order to exist. And that, my friends, that’s the kind of thinking that turns us into giants.

  Why go on about this old story? There’s plenty to do in the streets and houses of the city; there’s plenty to do in the cities and fields of the Empire, and some of you may be thinking that this storyteller’s too caught up in the tale he’s telling. Well, well, there’s some truth in that, but be patient; there’s not much more. It remains to be told that autumn came to the city of stone, and gave place to winter. And when the snow fell, the city was named Bibarandaraina, and received tribute from many new cities, weaker, poorer, smaller, more hastily constructed, which it in return defended and protected. In the center of this capital stood the ancient palace, now occupied by Emperor Bibaraïn I, called The Flute-Player, initiator of the Voronnsid dynasty, one of the founders of the Empire. None of you will ever find a portrait of The Flute-Player in the history books or the interminable galleries of images of the many men and women who sat on the Golden Throne, for no painting or sculpture of him remains, if there ever was one. We storytellers who sit in the town squares or in tents to tell old tales, only we can picture what he was like. And if you want something to remember him by, all you have to do is go into the palace of the good Emperor Ekkemantes I, find the room that gives on the hexagonal garden, and gaze at the last vestige of another palace, one that was destroyed, like the Empire, by war, and that, like the Empire, was brought back to life, thousands of years ago, by that man who was too weak, too inquisitive, too disobedient.

  He was a good emperor. I won’t say he was perfect, because he wasn’t; no, my friends, no man is perfect and an emperor less than anybody, because he holds power in his hands, and power is as dangerous as an animal not fully tamed, dangerous as acid, sweet and fatal as poisoned honey. But I do say he was a good emperor. He knew, for example, the right side of the coin from the wrong side, and that’s already a great deal to know. Of course he sometimes chose the wrong, for the birth of an Empire is something too big for the thoughts, the feelings, and the acts of a single man. And so it was that the first thing he did was organize an army—wrong—in order to keep down disorder in the semibarbarous cities and towns and to protect those that were already his subjects—right. After that he had the ruins and remains of the old Empire brought to light wherever there was a trace of them, which was all across the whole territory, and returned them to their place and splendor, and thanks to them he could trace out the borders of the provinces. And then he selected the cleverest men and set them to deciphering the sound and meaning of whatever they found written on paper, on cloth, on marble or on metal. Soon after, schools were founded, and as people had relearned to make fire and bury their dead, so they relearned to read, to write, to make laws, to compose music, to design gears, to polish glass, to solder metal, to measure fields, to cure sicknesses, to observe the sky, to lay roads, to count time, and even to live in peace.

  All this happened in one lifetime, yes, my dear friends, it really did. A long life, very long, but one life. Emperor Bibaraïn I married twice and had fourteen children, six boys and eight girls. He never learned to read and write: he said he didn’t need to, and maybe he was right. But he didn’t remain ignorant of anything about him. His second wife, the Empress Dalayya, learned reading and writing at fifteen, and at thirty had written four volumes of chronicles in which was recorded all that the excavations revealed about the old Empire, with precise details, and interpretations which were mostly mistaken but full of beauty and imagination. One of his sons was a mathematician and another a poet who sang of his father’s incredible life and the death of the old Empire, as he, who had seen it reborn, felt it might have been. All the children were intelligent, enlightened, and competent. And one daughter was as inquisitive and disobedient as a boy called Bib, in a tribe of semi-nomadic barbarians, had once been.

  They say, I can’t verify it, my good friends, but they say that when death came the old Emperor Bibaraïn saw it coming and smiled and asked it to wait a bit for him, and death waited. Not long, but it waited. The old Lord of the new Empire seated himself on the Golden Throne, called his wife, his children, his grandchildren, his ministers, and his servants, and told them he was dying. Nobody wanted to believe him; his eyes were so bright, his head so erect, his voice so clear, that nobody could believe him. Nobody except a girl who’d been ordered to wash her hands and comb her hair and put on some clean clothes before she came to see her august father. Having done none of these things, she tried to hide behind her older brothers. But she believed him. Old Bibaraïn I, The Flute-Player, smiled and said that he declared the inheritor of his throne to be his daughter Mainaleaä. He named her mother the Empress Dalayya as regent until the tangle-haired girl reached her majority. And while a scribe labored with quill and paper so that the emperor could sign the decree of succession and the order to maintain the ancient palace as long as possible, the old lord took his flute and began to play. When the scribe brought him the decree, the emperor signed it and then went on playing the flute until he remembered that death was waiting for him. He raised his eyes in the midst of a very high note, looked at death, and winked. Death came to him, and the old lord died, playing his flute, seated on the Golden Throne that had belonged to the lords of the greatest and most ancient empire ever known.

  The Two Hands

  What Blaise Pascal said: Car il est malheureux, tout roi qu’il est, s’il y pense.

  The storyteller said: Between the dynasty of the Oróbeles, called the Dark Princes, and that of the Three Hundred Kings, of whom there were in fact only twelve if you count the child who reigned for a single day, the imperial throne was held by a nameless usurper. He came from the south, was drawn into the palace by the tides of war, and never came out again. Some people say he’s still there, which is not impossible, as you’ll see. The tale of his life and works is banal, sorry, and inconclusive. Have any of you ever gone near the imperial palace? Have you seen the towers, the immeasurable terraces, the black walls, the fountains? No, nor have I, and even now it’s very hard to do so. That’s why this story belongs to other people. I’m the one they give presents to and butter up to get me to tell about old, forgotten things. But this time, though it probably won’t work, I’m going to try—why not?—to say nothing.

  What the Archivist said: I live my life, gentlemen, in folio. I have seen nothing and read everything. Your life, too, is written down, it’s catalogued, classified, and archived, and if your wife wants to know about your childhood she need only come to me: I can take it down from the proper shelf and spread it out before her. Now, as for t
he Dark Princes, gentlemen, there were seven of them. They were aristocrats, not strong enough to be good rulers. They married within the family, uncle with niece, cousin with cousin, brother with sister. The last of the Dark Princes was a babbling, snivelling idiot, uselessly married to one of the most beautiful women that ever walked the earth. He was blind to that. He took little interest in the history of his race and less in that of his people. He ate little, slept less, and welcomed every fortune-teller, augur, priest, mage, alchemist, inventor, and charlatan who asked to see him. He was called Orbad and appeared in imperial decrees as the Great, the Powerful, and above all, the Mysterious. But he had very little resemblance to Or, or it may have been Oróbel, the first of the Dark Princes, a black-skinned, filthy, frightful giant of a man, who fouled the marbles of the palace when he came back from hunting or fighting or chasing after women. One day somebody came to the palace who did look like Or, and I wonder if it wasn’t actually Or himself, and the next day Orbad the Great, the Mysterious, the Idiot, was dead.

  What the chambermaid said: The empress was so beautiful! I can’t remember what her name was any more, but she was so beautiful, and a virgin all her life. Such a pity! I can say that, I’ve buried three husbands and never bothered to be faithful to any of them. Well, so, she came, the empress came to the imperial palace, two days after the coronation of Orbad the Mysterious. They say she came from that fortress where they raised beautiful women the way they raised cattle, where they never let any stranger enter except a certain Smith. But that seems unlikely, because Smith himself explained afterwards why no woman ever left there. But maybe it was true, maybe she escaped from the Alendar, or they let her escape. She arrived in a carriage and with a retinue. She was veiled and dressed in purple. That very day they got her married to the emperor. They got her married, I say, because when she saw him, white as a worm, feeble, with red eyes and trembling hands, she found him disgusting. But she was well brought up, she’d been educated for the throne. She spent her wedding night sitting on a footstool, in a white tunic bordered with gold, a wreath of flowers on her head, waiting, by the light of a single lamp. The next night she waited again; I brought her fresh flowers for the wreath. And after that she didn’t wait any more. She always locked her door from inside, though there wasn’t any need. When the warrior came, two years after that, she was just as beautiful as ever, and she saw him from the balcony. She still locked her door, but the warrior was very strong. I never saw her again.