The Flight from Kar (The Emperor's Library

by Frederick Kirchhoff

  “That’s why Lawrence has stayed with me,” the Emperor continued. “Who else but a librarian would prove loyal to a monarch whose favorite room was the library? Perhaps it’s there that they’ll find me when they seize the palace—reading a book in the library. There’s an old saying about a captain going down with his ship. The library is the closest thing I have to a ship. It’s taken me across the seas, hasn’t it? So what better place to meet my end—there, among the most precious relics of the Empire? Indeed, the books are far more precious than me. I’ll be honored to die in their midst.”

  “But, Your Majesty, the library is what we must save,” Jon said. It was, he realized, a feat the Emperor wanted to accomplish but which he’d convinced himself was impossible.

  “No, my friend. There’s no way to save the library, just as there’s no way to save me. I’ll be here in the palace when they come, waiting for the Chosen to put an end to my life. I won’t put up a fight. My only hope is that they’ll dispatch me with a single blow—the same way they execute traitors. I’ve been told they have a special school where the executioners are trained—large, powerful men, able to sever your neck with a single stroke. It must hurt for a split second, but then it’s over. Over forever.”

  “You mustn’t talk that way,” Zoë told him. “You must come with us to safety.”

  “Come with you to safety and leave all this behind?” he asked, glancing around the room.

  “Why not?” she replied. “It’s only a building.”

  The Emperor moved away from her and looked out the window.

  “I must politely disagree. It isn’t only a building. It stands for all that has made the Empire worth preserving. It stands for knowledge and justice. Lawrence keeps urging me to flee, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life running away. I want to die in the palace my ancestors built. When they come to burn the books, I intend to be there.”

  “Burn the books?” Jon asked.

  “Yes,” the librarian responded. “It’s said that they burn all books but their own. Haven’t you heard that? They believe their god has given them one sacred text and everything else is blasphemy. They incinerate all other books they can lay their hands on, and if men try to save a volume or two, they burn them as well.”

  “So they’ll come to burn the library?”

  “Most certainly. They must know it’s here. Everyone knows about the Imperial Library.”

  “Lawrence is right,” the Emperor said. “When the Chosen enter Kar, they’ll head straight for the palace, and nothing in the palace is more renowned than its collection of books.”

  Jon had never heard of the library; nor, he suspected, had Zoë. More important, John, who’d made a point about learning all he could about the wonders of Kar, hadn’t mentioned the library. It was likely fewer people were aware of it than Lawrence and the Emperor assumed. Yet for them nothing was of greater importance.

  “Then we’ll have to save it,” Jon announced firmly. “What’s the value of our lives compared to the knowledge the library holds?”

  For the first time since John’s death, a real goal—his own goal—crystallized. This was the reason he’d come here—not to repay his debt to the Foresters or to bring the Emperor a message, but to save the Emperor’s library from the fanatics who threatened it.

  “We must take the books where they’ll be safe from those burners.” Jon had never been so sure of anything in his life. And he knew he could persuade the Emperor to do it.

  “But where?” Zoë asked, surprised by Jon’s vehemence.

  The Emperor paced excitedly up and down the room, holding his left hand before him as if he were speaking to it.

  “I think there may be a place. There just may be a place,” he said, wheeling around to face them.

  Seeing their expectation, he turned away again and gazed out the window at the rooftops of Kar. He had an idea, Jon saw, but he was afraid to present it to them.

  “Where is that place, Your Majesty?” he asked.

  The Emperor looked down at the floor and spoke with hesitation.

  “To the West . . . in the mountains . . . an ancient fortress . . . West House it’s called, but few call it anything—only a handful of men probably remember its existence. There’s no earthly reason to go there. But that makes it an ideal location for hiding the library. Not West House itself—the Chosen are bound to get there eventually—but a place near the fortress known only to me and to one other man, whose loyalty is unquestionable.”

  “But how will you get it there?” the librarian asked. “So many books—and the enemy is at our gates.”

  The Emperor clutched his left hand.

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it? How will I get it there when I have so little time? There’s no way, I’m afraid. It was just an idea, but I see it’s impossible.”

  At that moment a man arrived with a tray of food.

  “Your midday meal, Your Imperial Highness,” he announced, bowing deferentially.

  “Ah, yes—but you see, I have guests.”

  “If you wish, I could arrange for a formal dinner—it would only take a short time—no more than an hour. We could serve it in one of the smaller dining rooms—perhaps the dragon room—that was always your favorite. I’m sure your guests would like that.”

  “No—we’ve no time for that. It would be very nice to sit with my friends over one of Falco’s extraordinary dinners, but we don’t have an hour to spare. What if I brought them to the kitchen? Could the staff provide us with food there?”

  Jon noted that this request caused no surprise.

  “Falco will do whatever you wish, Your Imperial Highness.”

  The librarian coughed discretely.

  “What is it, Lawrence?” the Emperor asked.

  “But there are four more of them, Your Highness,” he said.

  “Four more? Why didn’t you bring them all to see me? But, no—you did wisely to bring only two. You understand me, Lawrence.”

  The librarian made a slight bow.

  “Go and get the four other Foresters and bring them to the kitchen. I’ll take our friends—I’m afraid I don’t even know your names.”

  He looked at them inquiringly.

  “Zoë.”

  “Jon.”

  “Come with me, Zoë and Jon. I wish I could show you more of the palace—it’s an extraordinary edifice—the oldest parts in use date back seven hundred years and they were built on even older foundations—but at least you’ll get a feel for it. The original building was nothing more than a fortified hall. Unfortunately it was torn down in one of the earlier reconstructions. Kar has been important for as long as men have written history, but all cities rise and fall. When the first hall was built, Kar had shrunk to a collection of ruins along the west bank of the river, but it began to grow as the Empire prospered. Morgan, the third Emperor, built the initial town walls, a semicircle running northwest from the palace and then back to the river. The palace wasn’t inside the city then, but of course all that has changed now.”

  Jon shook his head. They were on the edge of disaster, and this man was giving them a lecture about the building! But it made a kind of sense, didn’t it? He knew very little about being an emperor, but he knew a lot about the history of the Imperial Palace. It must have been a relief to find himself on familiar ground.

  Talking the whole time, the Emperor led them down a long, spiral stairway, then along a dimly lit corridor lined with closed cabinets, through one large empty room and then another.

  “Does it surprise you to see so little furniture?” The Emperor asked them.

  “I’d imagined a different kind of place,” Zoë admitted.

  “Of course you did. Everyone envisions the Emperor’s palace filled with untold riches—the fruits of hundreds of years of self-indulgence. And, in truth, it hasn’t always been as plain as it is now—but that was many years ago. If you were to explore the attics and basements you’d find all manner of things—but mostly junk, I f
ear. My ancestors appear to have devoted themselves to collecting quantities of junk. Fortunately the palace is large enough to store all of it and more.”

  “I have a question,” Jon said.

  “Ask it, by all means.”

  “The houses on the street from the South Gate are decorated with carvings and colored stones, but the exterior of the palace has no ornamentation. Why is that?”

  “The original palace that I told you about was as much a fortification as a dwelling, so there was no call for decoration. When Morgan rebuilt the palace, he might have turned it into a different kind of structure, but he decided he was powerful enough to need no show of wealth. Later, as Morgan’s palace was enlarged, the simplicity of the imperial buildings became a sign that the Emperors devoted the bulk of their revenue to works that benefited their subjects.”

  He laughed.

  “Of course roads and bridges benefited the Emperors as well as their subjects, since they tied the Empire together and enabled its rulers to exert greater authority; and they used the schools to teach children what they wanted them to know—like the fact that the Empire was the best of all political arrangements. But of course it’s impossible to distinguish what’s good for the people from what’s good for the Emperor.

  “The houses near the South Gate were built when the city expanded three centuries ago. If the palace had been begun during that period it might have resembled those mansions. Still, if you look at the floor in this room you’ll see that not all was austerity.”

  The surface beneath their feet was a mosaic representing a spring meadow. Jon had never seen any work of human hands so glorious. But the next room held an even more beautiful mosaic, depicting a lake of water lilies, with frogs on lily pads and fish swimming beneath the surface. Many of the stones were opalescent and produced an effect akin to the shimmer of light on water. It was extraordinary.

  “As you can see, my ancestors were particular about their floors. The palace contains other mosaics, but in my opinion these two are the best. The least formal, perhaps, but that’s why I’ve always loved them. I used to play here as a child. It was like being in a magic world.”

  Next, they crossed a banquet hall with an ornate table surrounded by rows of matching chairs and a single high-backed chair at the end. On one wall, a tapestry showed a field of sunflowers, and on the other, windows opened to an enclosed garden, with sanded paths and espaliered pear trees, now heavy with crimson fruit. At first, Jon thought the windows were simply openings in the wall, but then he realized that they held panes of glass. Glass so clear you didn’t notice it’s presence.

  “Are the windows glass from Dron?” he asked.

  The Emperor was surprised by the question.

  “How could you possibly know that? I doubt if anyone else in Kar would be able to recognize glass from Dron. Where did you see it before?”

  “I never saw it before; I read about it in a book.”

  “Try to break it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Strike it with something hard.” He looked around the room, but saw nothing he could offer Jon for that purpose. “At least hit it soundly with your fist. You can easily break ordinary glass with your fist. Go on. Try.”

  Reluctantly, Jon walked over to the window and struck it with the side of his fist.

  “Harder,” the Emperor ordered him.

  He struck it as second time.

  “It’s as hard as steel,” Jon said.

  “It’s harder than steel. You couldn’t break it with a hundred-pound hammer.”

  “Then how did you cut it?” Jon asked.

  The Emperor laughed.

  “We didn’t. It came this way—eight perfect panes of glass. A merchant sold them to the palace architect, and where he got them nobody knows, but this room was designed to hold them. Were you to see the table set with gold chargers and branched candelabra, their light reflected in the glass from Dron, you wouldn’t think the palace so plain, I suspect. But that’s a sight no one will ever see again. My father melted the chargers to pay the army, and the departing servants appear to have taken the candelabra as souvenirs. Let’s be thankful none of them saw fit to help themselves to books from the library.

  “I see you looking out the window. That courtyard is one of the oldest parts of the palace. The buildings on all four sides have changed over the years, but that little plot of ground has always been left open, although it’s been raised to correspond to the increased height of the rooms surrounding it. See the well in the center.”

  Jon hadn’t noticed the well. It was no more than a low circle of stones.

  “We call it the new well because the stonework was built up when the courtyard was raised, although that was centuries ago. Of course we don’t use the well any more,” the Emperor explained. “I don’t even know if there’s any water in it. No one is allowed out there but the Emperor himself and the gardener who tends the trees and flowers. He must have fled the palace with the other servants. I hope he left the door to the courtyard unlocked, since I have no idea where my father kept his key. It’s called The Emperor’s Walk, and there was something my father started to tell me about the courtyard once, but then he changed his mind and said that only the heir apparent needed to know. He could not have imagined that he and my brother would die on the same day.

  “The kitchen is just through this door.”

  He turned to Zoë.

  “If you went to the left, you’d find yourself in the dragon room, where we might have eaten our midday meal if I hadn’t been in such a hurry.”

  Passing through an archway, they made a right turn and descended a short, wide staircase that opened into the kitchen. On the right, windows and a door brought in sunlight; given the time of day, they must have been facing west, Jon noted. They’d entered the building from the South by climbing a flight of stairs, so the first courtyard had been a story above the plaza. But this room led to another courtyard, which was evidently at ground level; and, given its use, it stood to reason that there was a gate from the courtyard into the city, through which provisions could be brought to the palace.

  At the far end of the kitchen, ovens were built into the wall and a wide hearth held spits for turning meat. Glistening copper pots and pans hung from the ceiling, and a tall copper boiler was steaming in the corner. A few men and women were working—one adding charcoal to the fire beneath the boiler, another sharpening a knife—but others were doing nothing in particular. An extensive kitchen staff must have once been necessary for the palace, but now most were superfluous. All stood at attention when they saw the Emperor; and a large man wearing a blood-red sash came forward and knelt before him. Jon’s first thought was that the sash was a sign of the Chosen, but he realized at once that the color could only have been a coincidence.

  “Your Imperial Highness, once again you honor us with your presence.”

  “Falco, would it be possible for you to prepare a small meal for my friends and me. Four more guests are on the way, and you should include Lawrence as well—and his granddaughter. I should have told him to bring her. Falco, would you send one of your staff to the South Portal to tell Ellen to come here and then assume her place guarding the door. Someone should be there, although I’m not sure what good a single person can do.”

  Falco stood up. He towered over everyone else in the room, but he spoke in a soft voice.

  “It would be an honor. We were just unloading some vegetables brought from your farm this morning—including a basket of the purple squash Your Highness is fond of—small ones, just the way you like them. But, may I be so bold as to suggest that, instead of leaving one man at the portal, we bar the entrance altogether. I know that’s not the custom, but changed times call for new rules.”

  “You give good advice.”

  Falco bowed.

  The Emperor turned to Zoë and Jon.

  “You see, the members of my court have all fled the city, but the cooks remain loyal.”

 
“Your father was our father,” Falco said.

  “Yes. And that makes me your brother.”

  Falco bowed again, then hurried away and began giving orders to his staff. The Emperor signed for Zoë and Jon to take places for themselves at the long table, but they hesitated, reluctant to sit while the Emperor remained standing. Recognizing their feelings, he smiled and sat down.

  “You must forgive me. I’m not used to being a monarch.”

  A shade of distress passed over his face.

  “It hasn’t been much more than a week. Yet how quickly one forgets things! My father and my brother have been dead for—what is it?—eight days I think. It’s hard to know how one should behave. I should be overwhelmed with grief, but so much else has happened. At times I think I’ve lost the ability to feel.”

  “Your Majesty,” Jon said. “As Zoë told you, we, too, have known death. Zoë’s younger brother—one of the two brothers who were killed by your enemies—was my special friend, and I saw it happen before my own eyes, as did his sister.”

  The Emperor glanced at Zoë, who bent her head. Then he turned back to Jon.

  “Before your very eyes, you say? That must have been terrible. I suppose you’ll never forget it—and he was your special friend. My brother was different from me, but I loved him nonetheless and he returned my love. Sometimes, when one brother turns out better than another, bitter feelings can arise. But no bitterness stood between my brother and me. He respected me for what I was, and I respected him.”

  Lawrence came into the room followed by Klei, Alf, and Alice.

  “Here are three of the others, Your Majesty.”

  “But where is the fourth? You said there were four Foresters—and one of these—the young woman—isn’t dressed as a Forester.”