He signed for the company to halt.
“We should stay here and allow him to approach,” he explained. “He must have recognized me—otherwise he wouldn’t have opened the door—so he’ll expect to greet me with the formality due an Emperor.”
But how would Talis know he was Emperor? Jon wondered. News of his father’s death couldn’t have reached this remote outpost. Talis must believe he’s welcoming the prince who visited two years before.
Despite his age, the man walked without a staff, holding himself erect as he approached them. Ten paces from the Emperor, he stopped and bowed; then, standing straight once more, he welcomed him to West House and inquired about the health of his Imperial Majesty. His speech sounded like words from a book, but beneath the decorum, the old man was clearly both excited and puzzled by their arrival.
“I bring ill tidings,” the Emperor told him, sounding a bit like a book himself. “For my father is dead, Talis—as well as the Crown Prince, my older brother. Both died gallantly, fighting against rebels, but the glory of their deaths is small consolation for their loss. And now, because of this tragedy, I find myself Emperor.”
Talis made an even lower, more eloquent bow before he replied.
“Your father was a noble man in life as well as in death—and your brother as well, I trust—although I never had the privilege of meeting him. But, despite these sorrows, who can be more fit than you to ascend the throne? Even in grief, we can take comfort that your line continues. I shall inform the garrison of your arrival. It may require a few hours, but they will present themselves to Your Imperial Highness before the day is out—except for those on the mountain with their herds. It will take longer for the message to reach them. But be assured, all will be honored by this opportunity to serve their sovereign.”
Then, taking a step closer to the Emperor, he continued in a lower voice. “But, Your Imperial Highness, if you forgive an old man’s question, why do you travel with so few? And these men and women do not look like the Imperial Guard I remember from your father’s visit. Tall men they were, every one of them—all at least six feet in height and all in the prime of life. But of course that was half a century ago.”
“The men and women you see with me—at least most of them—are the Imperial Guard, whatever their appearance, my honored friend. And no Emperor ever had more trustworthy retainers. Moreover, they are sufficient to provide any services I may require at West House. By all means instruct the garrison to appear before me—I wish it—but tomorrow will be soon enough. Tell them to come at midmorning for review, but afterwards they may return to their homes and families, for it is not my intention to disrupt their lives. We’ll need provisions—that goes without saying; however, I have gold to pay for it. Please make that clear.”
So that’s what was in the heavy box, Jon thought. Certainly more gold than an emperor might have carried in his pockets.
The old man bowed again. Having acknowledged that gesture with a nod, the Emperor turned to Falco.
“Falco, go with Talis, and determine what stores can be bought from the villagers. The valley is known for its cheese; I’m sure you’ll find it to your liking. Also, have one of your men arrange pasturage for our horses and oxen. But first move the wagon and carts into the fortress. I would like them unloaded before the garrison review.”
Right on, Jon thought.
The Emperor turned back to the Warden.
“On second thought, I will review the men an hour after midday tomorrow and not in the morning. That will give us more time to conceal our cargo. Talis, I will not hide from you the fact that there is a secret entailed in our coming here and I count on your to maintain it. I will explain everything shortly, but, for now, I ask you to keep silent about the contents of our wagons. And when you speak to the garrison, tell them that there are only a dozen of us and no more.”
“Of course, Your Highness,” Talis replied. “I know how to keep a state secret.”
“Indeed you do, and that is why I trust you.”
Talis bowed.
“All will be done as Your Highness commands,” Falco said. “But as for the cheese, my cooks know it already. In Kar it’s called Road’s End and commands a high price. You’ve eaten it many times. Indeed, you were served Road’s End Cheese in the last meal you took in the palace.”
“Really? I didn’t know. Well, be sure to buy a wheel of it. It should be less expensive here than in Kar, but don’t bargain with these people. Pay what they ask without question.”
“Even if they try to cheat us?”
The Emperor smiled.
“Well, if they’re only trying to cheat us a little, pay what they ask. Otherwise, use your judgment.”
“Some men expect you to bargain with them,” Falco pointed out.
“Do they? That never occurred to me. But you must be right, Falco. As you know, I’ve never bought a cheese in my life. I’ve never bought anything—at least not face-to-face. It’s obvious I have much to learn, but now it’s time for me to begin learning.”
▲
The garrison, which was a garrison in name only, showed little emotion at the news of the old Emperor’s death. He was only a face on the coins they received for pretending to guard his fortress, while his son had visited the valley in the recent past and, far from reprimanding them for shirking their duty (as they fully expected), had thanked them for their service. A bit of a fool, they’d decided, but a fool who treated them well was better than a sharper man who might disrupt the life they’d grown used to. Grateful now to discover that he’d be making few demands, they were more than willing to sell him anything he desired—especially when Falco seldom objected to any price they asked and paid in gold and silver, rather than the copper they received from the merchants. Whatever his reasons for being there, the Emperor’s visit promised a windfall.
During the weeks that followed their arrival, Falco acquired considerable quantities of grain, wheels of cheese, and other staples—ostensibly to stock the fortress, but in fact to provision the structures above it. He also bought cattle to slaughter, as well as whatever fruit and vegetables the villagers were willing to sell. His purchases may have reduced their stores, but the sellers knew they could replace them many times over with the Emperor’s ducats. Some questioned the need of a dozen men and women for so much food, but others took it as evidence that the Emperor was expecting reinforcements—or simply assumed that extravagance went hand-in-hand with Imperial power.
▲
Once the review of the garrison was complete and the men sent on their way, the Emperor requested Talis to lead them to the secret door in the tower.
“Then it is no longer to be known only to the Emperor and his family?” Talis asked.
“Yes, that is my intention.”
Talis was disturbed by this news; he’d been keeping the secret for years. Yet he enjoyed the thought that he was carrying out an order from the Emperor himself.
Although the exterior of the tower was stone, its interior, stairs and all, was wooden. Each level contained a single room that used the cliff as one of its four walls, cut and smoothed to resemble masonry, and Jon had to acknowledge that, without its being pointed out, the passage into the rock at the top floor would have been invisible. Yet, its presence led to another unanswerable question: What had been here before the tower? A door cut into the cliff high above the valley floor would have served no purpose unless there had been access from below. Perhaps there’d been a ramp of some kind, which had been removed when they built the tower. Or a ladder or a wooden stairway. He could imagine a variety of alternatives, but none struck him as plausible.
“Follow me,” the Emperor told them, opening the aperture and entering the chamber it concealed.
Here, stairs to the top of the cliff climbed an empty shaft in a perfect spiral.
“Can you believe it!” Alf exclaimed. “What kind of people built this?”
The Emperor laughed.
“People like you a
nd me, I suspect. But I understand your reaction. Like you, I was amazed when I first saw it. Imagine the effort that went into removing so much rock. Just where did they put so much material?”
Jon knew the answer but he kept silent. He didn’t want to sound like a know-it-all.
“Yet the real question, my friend, is not how? but why? Given enough time and labor, just about anything is possible, but why would someone expend it for what we see here? If all you wanted was access to the top of the cliff, it would have been easier—and faster—to cut a sloping tunnel through the rock. And, even with the present design, rough cut stone would have been all you needed.”
“Maybe it had another purpose?” Jon suggested.
“Another purpose?” the Emperor asked. “What could that have been?”
“I don’t know. It was just a thought.”
“Can you imagine creating something like this?” Alf whispered to Jon. “Each step appears to be exactly the same size; every angle is precisely cut. The symmetry is perfect. I only wish there were a rail along the edge of the stairway. The sight of it alone makes me dizzy.”
The higher they ascended, the more threatening that central shaft became, since nothing stood between them and a fall into the darkness. Even the Emperor, who, had been this way before, kept his shoulder next to the outside wall as he climbed.
Describing this place, the Emperor had called it strange, but he’d failed to convey the depth of that strangeness.
Reaching the top of the stairs they reentered the sunlight on a mountain spur that stretched a good distance to the West, forming a tilted plateau or mesa that rose towards an upthrust of the central peak. But this topography was less striking than what it held. From where they stood, a row of stone cylinders, the nearest about fifteen feet high, led toward the mountain. Some of the blocks were cracked or fissured, others had shifted from their original position, and a few appeared to have been thrown over, but most stood parallel at exactly repeating intervals—about fifty paces, Jon guessed.
“I know what you want to ask,” the Emperor said, looking at Jon. “But I don’t know what they mean either. There’s another line of them over there.” He pointed south. “And a third beyond that one. Thirty-six in all—I counted them the last time I was here—growing shorter as they ascend the plateau, keeping their tops level. And X-shaped notches are cut into the crowns of the cylinders. You can’t see them from here, but you can if you walk toward the mountain and then look back. They must have been used for something, but I have no idea what, and Talis hasn’t either. He says they’ve always been here—that’s all.”
Talis bowed in agreement.
“But you see why I chose this spot to hide the library,” the Emperor continued. “In a place with so many secrets, one more is likely to go unnoticed.”
Jon wasn’t sure he agreed. Anything that attracted curiosity was likely to draw attention. The best hiding place, he thought, would be one that aroused no curiosity. An out-of-the-way Kar basement, providing the books could have been carried there unobserved, would probably be as safe as this mountaintop. Still, it was hard to imagine the Chosen looking here for the Emperor’s library—as long as no hint reached them of the Emperor’s visit. And did they really care about the library? Lawrence seemed to regard it as the primary reason the Chosen wanted to control Kar, while the Emperor considered it “a great treasure” worth taking extraordinary measures to secure. And a treasure it surely was. But why would the Chosen be searching for it? If they wanted to get their hands on something, it was the Emperor himself, not his books. And why go to much trouble looking for what you simply wanted to burn?
Following a path that led past the closest line of cylinders, they came upon the first of the Imperial ruins—built, as the Emperor had described them, on the foundation of
older structures; and the juxtaposition of two building styles told a remarkable story. The Emperors may have prided themselves on the progress of technology, but, in contrast to the masonry of the lower courses, with their large, perfectly cut blocks of stone, the later stonework was crude—little more than rubble in some places. It was like the difference between the tower and the stairway it concealed. Some of the upper buildings were almost whole, with only parts of the roof missing, while others were no more than heaps of stone, but their purpose was impossible to determine. A spring bubbling out of the rock nearby may have explained their location; however, the presence of water and the vegetation that surrounded it did little to dispel the mystery of why and by whom the original complex had been built.
As the others wandered about the site, Alf and Jon paced off the dimensions of one of the larger buildings, disturbing several red-and-black-banded snakes that had been sunning themselves among the rocks.
“Do you think they’re poisonous?” Alf asked.
“I don’t know. Peter taught me about the snakes in the Foresters’ valley, but he never said anything about these red-and-black guys. They look harmless, but I wouldn’t try to play with one.”
“Play with one? Are you crazy? Snakes scare the daylights out of me.”
Once they’d returned to the corner where they’d begun their measurement of the building, Alf stopped to calculate its total dimensions, holding his breath the way he always did when he was ciphering in his head.
“Thirty-two thousand square feet, plus or minus a hundred or two. That’s huge,” he said to Jon. “And this is just the foundation. What could have been built above it?”
“Maybe nothing,” Jon suggested. “It could have been simply a platform—like a floor for some kind of ceremony—or a market—they could have had a market here. You remember the market at Bridgetown, don’t you?”
But he knew that was an absurd question, and so did Alf.
“A market? Where would the stuff they sold come from and how could there be enough people here to make it possible? Maybe down in the valley—but I doubt it. The land around Bridgetown was dense with farms, while here they raise a few cattle and a handful of vegetables for their own tables. That’s about all. If it was a market, what would they buy and sell in so big a space?”
“You forgot the cheese,” Jon pointed out.
“Most of it goes directly to Kar.”
“Then it wasn’t a market,” Jon acknowledged. “Like I said before, maybe it was a platform they used for a ceremony—like the plaza in Great Barton.”
“Are you suggesting they chopped off heads here?”
“I’m not suggesting anything.”
Nevertheless, Jon was sure that, even if it hadn’t been a market like the one at Bridgetown, it had been a place where people came together for some purpose.
“Okay, let’s say it was a floor of some kind but we have no idea what they used it for. Then, when they went away, someone else came here and built a new structure above it?”
“That’s what it looks like to me. You can see that the newer parts aren’t structurally integrated with the lower ones. They were just placed there, one on top of the other, relying on their weight to hold them steady.”
“That’s true,” Alf said. “And they didn’t do a very good job of it either. The new buildings have crumbled while their foundation remains strong.”
The more they examined the ruins, the greater their mystery, with the rectangular array of thirty-six columns the most enigmatic of all. Jon and Alf agreed that the complex hadn’t been intended for defense. Neither had identified the trace of a surrounding fortification.
“But once they got up here, why would they need fortified walls?” Zoë asked, arriving in time to hear the final words of their discussion.
“They wouldn’t—if they had a way to block the stairs we took,” Alf replied.
“Yes, but I have trouble imagining them using the stairs as their primary access to the plateau,” Jon said. “This is a large site. It’s relatively narrow, but it extends for miles. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people could have lived here, but I can’t believe they all came and went by
the spiral stair. You might be able to climb up from the valley to the South—the slope is steep but it’s not a sheer cliff like the north face. Still, if there’d been a trail you’d think we’d see at least a trace of it. And the people who lavished such care on the spiral stair wouldn’t have been content with a rough path—they would have constructed a grand staircase.
“I see what you mean,” Alf said. “If they lived here for any length of time, they would have had to haul up all kinds of stuff, and it would have taken a long time if the only access was the spiral. It’s going to be a pain to get the library here three or four books at a time. Imagine carrying up enough food for a thousand people day after day after day. And the water over there couldn’t have been enough for so many.
“But the building blocks are the real puzzler. There’s no way those hunks of granite could have been carried up the stair. Even if there’d been a mechanism to hoist them—which isn’t easy to believe—because many are too big to fit through the opening from the tower—or whatever was there back then.”
As they spoke, some of the others approached to hear what Jon and Alf were saying.
“Couldn’t they have been taken from the rock right here?” Alice asked. “I’ve seen the quarry at Bridgetown where they cut the stones they used for the walls and the bridge. The deepest part is full of water now—we used to swim there in the summer. I always thought it was a beautiful place.”
“I wish I’d seen it,” David said. “But if there’s a quarry, it should be easy to find. All you’d have to do is look for it. You and I could do that, Alice—once the books are carried up.”
“I doubt you’ll find a quarry,” Alf said. “The foundation stones are very different from the rock we’re standing on. The newer parts may be local—they resemble the material used to build the tower. But the older masonry didn’t come from this plateau—I’m sure of that. So I think we’re still faced with a riddle.”
“The stairs remind me of a back door,” Klei observed. “If you lived in a place this big, you’d have an entrance like the gates of Kar, not a dark, narrow stairway.”
The Flight from Kar (The Emperor's Library Page 33
