The Carpet Makers (14 page)

Tertujak was very good at calculations, like all traders, but he had also inherited the extensive mathematical gifts of his ancestors. It wasn’t difficult for him to chart these comparative numbers in expressive curves: the curves pointed downward. In fact, they were almost crashing downward; the trend had drastically increased in recent years. They were the curves of a dying organism.

The logical conclusion would have been to get out of the business with hair carpets. But he would never be able to do that. He was bound to the Guild by his oath to the end of his life. Producing hair carpets was the sacred duty given to this world by the Emperor—but, for some reason, the vitality behind this duty seemed to have waned.

And in this context, Tertujak had to think about the prisoner again and about what was said of him. They accused him of the most incredible things in Yahannochia. They said he claimed to have come from another world. And still something else, something that profoundly shocked everyone, but was nevertheless always passed along: that the Emperor, the Lord of the Heavens, the Father of the Stars, the Keeper of all their Destinies, the Middlepoint of the Universe—that the Emperor no longer reigned!

Tertujak looked at his depressing charts, and something inside him wondered whether that could be the explanation.

He raised himself to his feet and opened the wagon door. Night had fallen in the meantime. There was laughter from the soldiers who were chasing after the few women in the caravan. Because these women were, without exception, camp followers, it was not a matter with which the trader had to concern himself. He waved to one of the two watchmen.

“Get Commander Grom for me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Grom soon entered. Permission to enter the trader’s residence cart when he was summoned was the privilege of his rank. “Sir?”

“Grom, I have two requests for you. First, see to it that not all the mounted soldiers drink themselves senseless. I want to know that at least some of the men are battle-ready. Second,” Tertujak hesitated a moment and then continued decisively, “I would like to have the prisoner brought to me discreetly.”

Grom’s eyes opened wide. “The prisoner?
In here?
In the wagon with you?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

Tertujak gave an irritated snort. “Do I owe you an explanation, Rider Commander?”

The officer winced. His rank was totally dependent on the pleasure of the trader, and he wasn’t about to lose it. “Forgive me, sir. As you wish.”

“Wait awhile until most of them are asleep. I don’t want any gossip about it. Take two or three discreet men to escort the prisoner, and bring along a chain to tie him up here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And remember: utmost discretion!”

Tertujak awaited the prisoner’s arrival with nervous impatience. Several times he came close to sending one of the soldiers on watch to hurry things along, and it required almost physical effort to restrain himself.

Finally, there was a knock at the door. Tertujak opened quickly, and two soldiers brought the prisoner inside. They chained him to a support post, after which the trader dismissed them with a quick nod.

Then he scrutinized the man who was now sitting on one of his most valuable pelts. So that was the heretic. His clothes had been torn into dirty rags; his tousled beard and his matted hair were also covered with filth. He reacted to the scrutiny of the trader with a dull, uninterested stare, as though he no longer cared what happened to him.

“Maybe you’re wondering why I had you brought here,” Tertujak began finally.

He thought he could see a spark of interest ignite in the apathetic eyes of the prisoner.

“The truth is that I don’t know precisely myself.” Tertujak thought about the silhouette of Fist Rock against the dark blue evening sky. “Maybe it’s because tomorrow we will see our destination, the Port City, for the first time. And I don’t simply want to hand you over to the Port Council without finding out just who it is that I have been transporting.”

The man gave him a dumb stare, as expressionless as before.

“What’s your name?” asked Tertujak.

Endless time seemed to pass before the prisoner answered. His voice was a dusty croak. “Nillian … Nillian Jegetar Cuain.”

“Those are three names,” the trader said, surprised.

“We all have three names where I am from.” The man coughed. “We bear our birth name, our mother’s name and our father’s name.”

In the heretic’s manner of speech, there really was a foreign sound that the trader had never heard in his travels.

“Then it’s true, that you come from another world?”

“Yes.”

“And why are you here?”

“I was stranded here.”

“Where is your home world?”

“Far away.”

“Can you show it to me in the sky?”

The prisoner stared so long at Tertujak that the trader thought he hadn’t understood the question. But then he suddenly asked, “What do you know of other worlds? What do you know of travel between the stars?”

The trader shrugged his shoulders. “Not much.”

“What do you know?”

“I know about the starships of the Imperial fleet that take the hair carpets on board. I’ve been told that they can travel between the stars.”

The unkempt fellow, who claimed to come from the stars, seemed to revive.

“The hair carpets,” he repeated, and bent forward, supporting his elbow on his knee. “Where are they taken?”

“To the Palace of the Emperor.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t know,” Tertujak admitted. “That’s what I was told.”

The man who called himself Nillian nodded, and Tertujak saw a bit of sand trickling from his hair onto the floor. He would have to have the room cleaned tomorrow. “They lied to you. There are no hair carpets in the Palace of the Emperor. Not a single one.”

Tertujak squinted his eyes with suspicion. That sort of statement was to be expected from someone who was considered a heretic. But what if he wasn’t a heretic? “How do you know that?” he asked.

“I’ve been there.”

“In the Imperial Palace?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you didn’t notice the hair carpets.”

For the first time the foreigner laughed. “That’s impossible. I’ve seen a hair carpet; it was the most finely worked and most extravagant work of art I’ve ever seen in my life. Such a work of art wouldn’t remain undiscovered. And we aren’t talking about just
one
carpet here; we’re talking about thousands and countless thousands. But not a single one of them is to be found in the palace. Our language doesn’t even have a
word
for them!”

Could that be true? And if it were a lie—what purpose could the man have for telling it?

“They say,” Tertujak began, “that the Palace of the Emperor is the largest building in the universe.”

The man thought for a moment. “Yes, that’s probably true. But that doesn’t mean nothing can be found there. It would be easier for a man to hide in any of your cities than in the entire Star Palace.”

“But surely there must be private chambers for the Emperor where no one else is allowed?”

“Once there were such rooms.” The foreigner stiffened his posture. “I’m in prison here because I said this once, so I can certainly repeat it: The Emperor’s reign ended approximately twenty years ago, according to your time.”

Tertujak stared at the man sitting there, bound hand and foot with chains, ragged and filthy, and knew that he wasn’t lying. Of course, this claim was sheer heresy. But he felt deep inside himself a certainty that what the stranger had said was nothing but the truth.

“Then the rumors that have been circulating here for two decades are true,” he muttered thoughtfully. “That the Emperor abdicated?”

“Well, I would say that these rumors have been prettied up.”

“What do you mean by that?”

The expression in the prisoner’s eyes was suddenly steely. “Sir, I am a rebel, and my entire life I was a member of the Silent Wind movement. Twenty years ago we attacked the Central World, conquered the Palace, and overthrew the Emperor. Since that time, there has been no Empire. You may like it or not, but it is a fact.”

Unsure of himself, the hair-carpet trader looked the stranger over. What he was saying seemed to pull the ground from beneath his feet.

He pointed toward the window with a vague gesture. “Out there I see the stars in the sky, and they are still shining. I was always told that they couldn’t shine without the Emperor.”

“The Emperor has nothing to do with that,” responded the rebel. “That’s a legend.”

“But didn’t the Emperor call them into existence?”

“He wasn’t capable of that any more than I would be. He was a human being, like any other. They told you all that just to maintain power over you.”

Tertujak shook his head. “But isn’t it true that he has ruled for countless millennia? How could he do that unless he’s immortal?”

The stranger raised his eyebrows. “Well, however he managed that, now, at any rate, he’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“Dead. A rebel cornered him in a remote room during the occupation of the Palace and shot him.”

Tertujak remembered what he had been told about the circumstances of the foreigner’s arrest. He had been a guest of two carpet makers and had suddenly begun to make blasphemous statements. They had arrested him and charged him with heresy.

“You said those things to the carpet makers?” he said in astonishment. “It’s a miracle that they didn’t kill you outright.”

“They gave me a blow to the skull—it’s a miracle I survived it,” growled the prisoner. “One of the two kept eagerly asking me questions, while the other one slipped around behind me and—whack! When I woke up, I lay in a dungeon and was in chains.”

Tertujak began pacing back and forth nervously. “You say there aren’t any hair carpets in the Imperial Palace. On the other hand, I see tens of thousands of hair carpets leaving this planet year after year. Where are the Imperial Shipsmen taking them, if not to the Palace?”

The stranger nodded. “I’ve already realized that this is the most interesting question of all. And I don’t have a ghost of an answer.”

“Maybe we aren’t talking about the same Emperor?”

“We’re talking about this man,” said the prisoner, and pointed to the photograph of the Emperor hanging on the wall. Tertujak had inherited the picture from his father, who had in turn inherited it from his father, and so on. “Emperor Aleksandr the Eleventh.”

“Emperor Aleksandr?” For the first time this evening, Tertujak was totally astounded. “I didn’t even know he had a name.”

“That also slipped into obscurity. He was the eleventh in a series of Emperors, all named Aleksandr. The first ten also lived to be quite old, but he ruled longer than all the others combined. And his rise to power happened so unimaginably long ago that it seemed as though he had ruled since the beginning of time.”

“Well.” Tertujak shook his head and then began his nervous pacing again. The stranger watched him silently.

Was that it? Was that the explanation? The explanation for the diminishing number of hair carpets?

He sat down again on his divan.

“What you say,” he admitted, “awakens a resonance inside me. But at the same time, I can’t comprehend it. Do you understand? I can’t imagine that the Emperor could be dead. He seems to be somehow inside me, a part of me.”

“That concept of the Emperor as a superhuman being is a product of your education, since you, after all, never saw the Emperor.” The foreigner struggled with something on his belt, as best his chains allowed. “I have a picture that I actually wanted to keep hidden until I finally have some sort of a trial.”

He brought out a photograph, which he handed to the trader. Tertujak examined the image. With sickening clarity, it showed the dead body of a man who had been hung by his legs from a flagpole and who dangled there headdown. Through his chest was a hole bigger than a fist, the edges of which were seared as though by fire.

When he turned the picture upside down to take a better look at the face of the dead man, it hit him like a bolt of lightning, and he thought his heart would stop that very instant. He knew this face, knew it better than his own! The dead man really was the Emperor!

With a wordless moan, he tossed the photo aside and sank back into the pillows on his seat. That was impossible. That was … He reached for the picture again to be sure. The Emperor. Dead. Dead in his parade uniform, the imperial cloak around his shoulders, hung without honor on a flagpole.

“Now you feel like someone has struck you on the forehead with a hammer,” the voice of the rebel seemed to reach him from a great distance. “If it’s any comfort, you aren’t the first one to feel like that. This photograph is today perhaps one of the most widely circulated pictures of all time, and it’s our most important aid in freeing people from the stranglehold of their fixation on the Emperor as a god.”

Tertujak barely heard him. Behind his forehead was a sensation like boiling water. His mind was working at a crazy pace; it raced through all the images in his memory, tried to see and organize them anew: everything, everything had to be rethought. None of the things that had always been true were true anymore.

What was this foreigner babbling on about? He didn’t understand him. He saw only this image and tried to comprehend the truth in its full measure: The Emperor was dead.

“… the noise outside?”

“What?” Tertujak emerged from the whirlwind of his thoughts and feelings as though from a nightmare. Now he heard it, too. Loud noises penetrated in from outside, shouts and screams and the clang of metal against metal. It sounded dangerous.

With one leap, the hair-carpet trader was on his feet at the entrance. He tore the door open and stuck out his head. He saw torches, running people, shadows, and the dark contours of mounted animals hurtling straight through the camp. Battle sounds. He slammed the door again and fumbled with his fleshy hand at the thin chain he wore around his neck.

Everything is falling apart, he thought.

“What’s happening?” the stranger asked.

“Robbers,” the trader heard himself say with unnatural calm. “They’re attacking the camp.”