Cassilda's Song: Tales Inspired by Robert W. Chambers King in Yellow Mythos

by Allyson Bird

  “Dear Most Honorable Professor G., I have seen under the bridge near the fish market, the words ‘Garanga’s Law: the Restitution of the Damned.’ Professor G., do you truly think the damned can be redeemed? Consider the traitor Peter Sumit, who is running for parliamentary office. He may wrap himself in the flag, but the people know who he is and what he did during the war. Politely ask for your comment on this matter. Most Respectfully Yours, Tomas Touli.”

  When Joseph first heard about Garanga’s Law, he had been flattered, thinking himself elevated to the same plane as Newton, as Fermi. And even after he understood that the people who had written this law were insane, because his countrymen couldn’t drive through an intersection without inviting a head injury, Joseph still sang himself to sleep with thoughts of someday opening his copy of Foreign Affairs and reading, “according to Garanga’s Law, named after the preeminent political scientist Joseph Garanga, the ability of a former colony to meet expectations of a high-functioning state in the first five years of its independence directly corresponds to the former colony’s ability to retain its functional independence.”

  Flores said, “Maybe it’s a different Garanga. Maybe a cousin of yours that got famous.” It was absurd. He told her so. His father was a goat farmer. The only other member of the family who had clawed out of the mud was his cousin Anton, a provincial-level government accountant who would never have a Law named after him. Only Joseph could carry their banner, and if Flores didn’t marry soon, that banner would rot with him. He told her that too.

  “Professor?”

  “Just say that I don’t comment on politics.”

  His graduate assistant gave him a look of accusation. He glowered right back. Yes, he was a frequent guest at the Palace—but he had been Michael’s mentor, back when the National University was still Queen’s Crossing University. And yes, he might include surly policy prescriptions in his papers, but that was simply a fulfillment of his responsibility as one of the nation’s top social scientists. It was all he and his few competent colleagues could do to keep this newborn, fever-prone country from rolling off the bed and breaking its head open on the floor.

  Adela was saved from further impoliteness by Robert Fileppo, who wandered in from the literature department. He looked very flush and very pleased, which was not unusual—coming from a family that had been mysteriously allowed to keep its tea plantation, Fileppo had never known the meaning of hardship. “Joseph, I am sorry to interrupt, but I must ask…” What was unusual was that Fileppo was rudely pointing several dainty aristocratic fingers directly at him, and grinning ear to ear. “Have you seen the yellow sign?”

  “No, what does it say? Traffic closed again on Patriot Street?”

  Fileppo’s grin flickered, and after a pause during which he looked stuck as a propaganda reel in a humid jungle theater, Fileppo rushed to his desk and placed a book on top of the latest International Politics. “I cannot believe you haven’t read this. Haven’t you heard them yammering about it at the Polo Club? It’s all about your subject, Joseph. Governance.”

  The book reminded Joseph of skin—leather-bound, sun-tanned pages, smell like someone who’d been cooped up in a dungeon for sixty years. The King in Yellow was stamped into the cover, in the colonists’ language. “It sounds like a children’s book,” he said. There was no author, no publication information. Many colonial tomes wore such masks: naked except for their titles in huge block font. It was as if they thought titles alone—Lord-Regent-Governor—were enough to bring the locals to their knees. It had taken Joseph years to admit they were right.

  Fileppo nodded, still grinning. “Read it immediately. It changes everything.”

  Joseph hated it already. “I doubt that.”

  “Professor, could I take a look?” Adela said. “After you’re finished, of course.”

  Fileppo glanced awkwardly at Adela’s dark skin and simple cotton. “It hasn’t been translated,” he said, and Joseph saw a hint of the real man, the pansy who bragged about wasting his money on imported wines, who would happily lounge on the backs of his people as long as he could keep his fantasy that a single colonist playmate might ever invite him to tea at the family chateau.

  “I don’t need it translated,” Adela said, grimly.

  “Adela’s very well educated,” Joseph added.

  “I see,” said Fileppo, and the strange velveteen curtain came down over his eyes again. The smile. “Good for you, dear.”

  Michael Dayamon sat wrapped in shadow behind a massive oak desk that had once belonged to the Regent of Concordia, signing edicts with the same focus that had consumed him during final exams. He had traded in the plain black cotton that he’d worn since he stumped for votes on the nation’s first muddy campaign trail for a stiff white uniform that hung a bit too wide on his shoulders. Despite all its brass and brilliance, the uniform ate light. It always had.

  Joseph had not seen that uniform for five years—not since Regent McMurphy walked out into the sun in that suit of blinding, funereal white on the final Colonial Day, to salute his guards and the Empire’s flag for the last time. Joseph had been there, standing and grimacing with all the other prominent locals—doctors, lawyers, the occasional tortured artist—who had to be reminded every year that resistance was futile, and the Empire was their king. Michael would not have seen it; Michael had been leading three rebel battalions through the prickly eastern jungle, bleeding and sweating and running on fumes.

  “You look like an emperor,” Joseph told him now.

  Michael glanced up—how deep the lines crinkling the boy’s forehead had become! But he was President Dayamon now, not Commander, not War-Hero. Don’t become their everything, Joseph warned, but Michael didn’t know how to turn down responsibility. The people cried their love; he’d won in a landslide. “Professor,” he said, standing out of habit. “It’s good to see you.”

  “When the President calls, you answer the phone.” Joseph groaned as he sank into a leather chair. It wasn’t just the long walk through the National Palace’s marble halls; it was the vertigo. Colonial architecture was drowned in mirrors and gold, totally unfit for a hot climate. He didn’t know why they hadn’t just blown up McMurphy’s mansion, why they’d insisted on renaming it, reclaiming it. It had never been theirs to begin with. “How can I help you?”

  “Professor, I greatly appreciated your guidance on nationalizing the imperial companies.”

  “It was the least I could do,” said Joseph, but his heart was swelling. An influential mentor to the nation’s first democratically-elected president, Joseph Garanga is credited with spearheading Dayamon’s effective and sophisticated nationalization policy.

  “I’d like your input on something else.” Michael rifled through a paper stack until he found a book. Leather-bound. Sun-tanned. Joseph knew what was coming before it came. The damned thing was the talk of the town. He wanted to believe it was just another fetish of a culture-starved bourgeoisie—the year before, everyone went mad trying to secure tickets to the Bluebell Circus, which cancelled their only show when a grubby illiterate crowd swarmed their vehicles—but the way it had everyone bowing to a foreign king who wasn’t even real truly crept under his skin. “The King in Yellow. I understand it’s the new Machiavelli.”

  Joseph frowned. “Who told you that?”

  “Willem the writer. You know he was educated in Rome.” Joseph could not hold back a loud sigh. “I have on good intelligence that the top minds in the world’s capitals are all studying this text. I had to use a dictionary, but I got through it.” Michael grinned; foreign language had never been his forte, but he was smart enough to wing anything. “Have you read it, Professor?”

  “No. And you should not be seduced by every flashy new idea that comes across the ocean. They do not have all the answers over there.” It was tempting to think so. After three hundred years under the yoke it was of course tempting to say, all hail the Empire, keeper of all that is wise and good! “Besides, you cannot make this coun
try your laboratory.”

  Michael chuckled. Before The King in Yellow docked at their ports, Joseph had never heard so much discomforting glee. Was it really so humorous, this new Machiavelli? “I remember. But Professor, this book has made me rethink our draft constitution. I know how terrible that must sound after all the work you and everyone else on the committee has put in.”

  A twinge of worry plucked Joseph’s heart. They could not keep riding the interim “constitution” that had been cobbled together by a small group of half-crazed fighters, buccaneers, and librarians on the eve of revolution. They had frantically copied pieces of other constitutions, whether socialist or fascist or liberal-democratic, and ended up with something less like the noble eagle and more like the freakish cassowary: big feet, no arms, skull like a dinosaur.

  “One of the many things The King in Yellow teaches is that as president, I embody the nation.” Michael put his hand over his heart. His big bursting heart, the reason he was loved. He’d bleed for the country. He already had. “Those who threaten me, threaten the state. That means all these extra rules and provisions just give the imperialist counter-revolutionaries enough wiggle room to sow discord. I say we scrap the requirement for two-thirds parliamentary approval, give me final say over justices, remove the need for direct elections…”

  For a moment Joseph could only stare. Where had he gone wrong? “Michael… there aren’t any counter-revolutionaries, just politicians that disagree with you. And yes, some of them are very stupid, but you must let them grumble, if anything to ensure they don’t launch a coup.”

  Michael leaned forward, eyes ablaze. Joseph sat back, startled, wondering if this Michael-in-the-trenches, except with paint running between his eyes. “You have heard talk of a coup?”

  “No, no! You are the most beloved man in Concordia. Your approval rating is 85 percent.”

  “Then I should be able to guide this country in the right direction with no distractions.”

  “Michael, the constitution is not about you. Someday we may have a president who is not so well-informed.” Michael stared blankly, as if the possibility of a different president was beyond his understanding—indeed, they had not written in term limits. Joseph suddenly remembered, with an odd feeling in his stomach, that he was speaking to the man who still commanded the soldiers’ bullets, and instinctively lowered his chin. “With all due respect.”

  The President smiled at him—an earnest smile, not an inhuman one—the smile he’d seen in the lecture hall when the boy spoke of Rousseau and Locke. Michael the good student had argued for representation in the imperial Congress if such Congress was going to make decisions about Concordia’s governance; he was jailed for that essay. This had to be a ridiculous mistake. “I’ll take your opinion into account, Professor. Your guidance is very much appreciated.” A heartbeat of polite silence, and then: “If you’ll excuse me, I must run to a cabinet meeting.”

  “Oh, yes. Father of the country, you’ve got important work to do.” Joseph heaved himself off the chair and made for the door, very aware of the ache in his joints and the hurry with which Michael was fastening his gold watch. With one hand on the cold door knob, Joseph glanced back at his former student. “Michael, I have to ask. Why are you wearing that uniform?”

  Michael seemed to blush, but maybe it was a trick of the half-light. “You must make the people respond to you, Professor. They see this uniform and they understand ‘power.’ State power, I mean. See, I haven’t forgotten everything.”

  He wanted to ask Michael what his parents thought of that, but remembered at the last moment that Michael’s parents—like everyone’s parents, it seemed—were dead. Father died building the railroad, mother died of an imported colonial fever, as he recalled. He heard Flores whispering, “Maybe we can all start over,” and the thought of rebirth and amnesia, of the red sun taking the spilled blood down into the darkness, briefly coated his senses like syrup. It would never happen. As long as bureaucrats slept at their desks and ethno-religious fanatics banged at the gates, they would never be fully unchained. And sharks would come, smelling the blood. That was the entire point of his research. That was what Garanga’s Law should have proclaimed.

  Joseph hated his commute. He hated the half-finished high-rises, silent charbroiled skeletons of other states’ Leviathans. He hated the growing barrage of grim-faced boys in misfit helmets. He hated Michael’s optimistic yellow billboards plastered with doll-like rice-gathering children. He hated the slogan Onward to Victory. Onward to nothing. Michael had cancelled constitutional reform. They were supposed to be climbing the developmentalist ladder, exporting toys and then televisions and then luxury cars – but Joseph felt in his marrow that they were on the wrong escalator. They would export t-shirts, cocaine, the occasional plague. And underneath, where the real economy still swirled with the micro-activity of bartered chickens and tin and cheapness, the taunt appeared in spray-painted Technicolor—Garanga’s Law: the Restitution of the Damned. Enough soldiers to invade their neighbors, but nobody to scrub the walls of graffiti.

  It was a long, lonely walk to his muggy little office in the back corner of the social sciences wing—closed door after closed door, peals of frightened laughter occasionally erupting from offices he thought were empty. Adela was outside his door, looking as if she’d been waiting all night. She did not even wait for him to finish fumbling with his key ring before mumbling, “I need to talk to you about that film. The one advocating transmigration into the east.”

  “The Fertile Heart.” She was doing her doctoral research on colonial propaganda—arguing that colonist messaging had sunk into the national consciousness and could still be found in political statements today. A depressing, retrograde little topic, but he let her do it because he was afraid that she was right. She spent a lot of time in the library revving up the tick-tick-ticking of the National University’s only film projector.

  “There’s a… something in it I can’t explain. It looks like a man wearing a long yellow robe. He walks through the trees like he isn’t using feet, behind the main action. He appears in locations… thousands of miles apart. When he’s on screen, all you can do is watch him. And wait for him to notice you.”

  Joseph unlocked the room and opened the window. Two geckos immediately slithered in.

  “You never see his face. But I know it’s a warning. They’re going to come back.”

  For him, for her, for everyone in Concordia, there was only one “they.” Joseph walked to his desk; he had to at least feel the wood, even if it was fake, before he could rescue Adela from whatever insanity the library and the film and the ghosts of colonists past had afflicted. “You must not be sleeping enough,” he started, a bit uncertainly. “The Empire is fighting a war, a million miles away, it isn’t interested in…”

  “Yes, the war, that is why they will come, they need our resources, they will take us and put us in their war machines, they will feed us to their soldiers!”

  “Adela!” The fear in her voice, as if they were standing in the hallway, banging on the door, saying come out come out, your time is up was enough to speed his own weakening heart.

  She threw up her hands, lip trembling—he was afraid she was going to cry. “But what do you care if they come back? They won’t be able to hurt you. You’re a professor. You’re educated. Not some throwaway peasant girl.”

  How old had Adela been when they declared independence – twenty or so? Not much older than Flores. A blast of trumpets shook the window and broke his thought-stream—not another military parade. Whatever battle hymn they were playing was unrecognizable as music, let alone the national anthem. It sounded like radio interference. The damned book about the yellow king, where was Fileppo’s copy? He was going to burn it. “Adela, shut the window.”

  “I figured out what your law means, Professor. The Restitution of the Damned.” He snapped his head up—since when was that madness his responsibility? “They are the damned. And they will have their restitution.
They smell our blood.” She let out a long, awful, undignified sob that made Joseph exceptionally nervous: he tried, very hard, not to dwell on the atrocities and humiliations their people had suffered, even if it meant shutting out memories of Flores’ mother. It did no good. The only thing they could do was move… “We never stopped bleeding!”

  The book wasn’t there. The trumpets climbed to a crescendo – or were those gun shots? Cannons? What was Michael preparing that army for? Joseph covered his ears and shouted, “Would you shut that damned window!”

  The call came past midnight. It pulled Joseph out of a dream of stumbling through a blue-green jasmine-scented forest, fighting through undergrowth that rose mad and gnarled like bodies after a flood, because he was being chased by something hidden. Something that stalked, something that remembered. Something that wasn’t fooled by their “progress.” Michael was whispering: “You must come to the palace. There is something you need to see, Professor.”

  His silent house, filled with stiff makeshift altars to Flores’ mother, shifted around him as Joseph dressed. He drove himself through a city that no longer slept, because eyes were watching all the time—from sewers, behind lamp posts, on the bloody side of sleeping faces. When the president calls, you don’t say no. The interim constitution, that freakish cassowary, was gone. Michael said on his daily radio address that the nation had been freed from the tyranny of its confusion. His word was all that remained now.

  The Palace was abuzz, maids and guards running around frantic and whispering as if preparing for a teatime state visit. Michael’s wife, the pretty half-breed Isabella who always wore the latest colonial chic, stood biting a thumbnail at the end of a long mirrored hallway. Isabella grabbed at Joseph as he passed, whispering, “Have you seen the yellow sign?” He cast her off, disgusted. “Don’t, don’t. Don’t look if you see it.”