Fantastic Metropolis

Long is the history of the Empire, very long, so long that a whole life dedicated to study and research isn’t enough to know it wholly. There are names, events, years, centuries that remain dark, that are recorded in some folio of some archive waiting for some memory to rescue them or some storyteller bring them back to life, in a tent like this, for people like you, who’ll go back home thinking about what you heard and look at your children with pride and a little sadness. As well as being long, the history of the Empire is complex: it’s not a simple tale in which one thing happens after another and the causes explain the effects and the effects are in proportion to the causes. Nothing of the kind. The history of the Empire is strewn with surprises, contradictions, abysses, deaths, resurrections. And I tell you now that those stones lying in an unused room of the emperor’s palace are, precisely, death. And resurrection.

For the Empire has died many times, many deaths, slow or sudden, painful or easy, silly or tragic—died and re-arisen from its death. One of those deaths, thousands of years ago, was deeper and darker than the others. It wasn’t silly, nor tragic, but mindless, senseless, heart-breaking: men killing one another for the most futile and dangerous of the passions, power, so they could attain the Golden Throne, sit on it, and stay sitting on it as long as possible. An ambitious general killed an inept emperor. The emperor’s widow, who had always lived in his shadow and whose name is forgotten, avenged her husband and at the same time cleared her own way to the throne by killing the general with his regicidal sword before he could take over the palace. Then she cultivated the resentment of the leaderless soldiers, something she was good at since she was quite familiar with resentment herself; she incited them against the officials and had every general of the Imperial Army killed so that none of them might conceive the same idea as her husband’s assassin. The dead emperor’s brothers armed themselves and ran to the palace to defend the helpless widow, so they said—in fact to try to seize the throne from her. There was an uprising in the eastern provinces, where a bankrupt nobleman who claimed descent from an ancient dynasty asserted his right to rule the Empire. Somebody strangled the empress in her bed and stabbed her children to death, though it was said that one girl escaped the slaughter. From the bogs and forests of the south came hordes of the dispossessed, sacking the cities, improving on the confusion left in the wake of the armies. In the north a charlatan said heavenly voices had ordered him to proclaim himself emperor and kill all who opposed him, and unfortunately many believed him. Within months war was everywhere, a war in which men ended up not knowing and not wanting to know who they were fighting against, in which it wasn’t a matter of kill or die but kill and die. Plague made its appearance. Within a year the population of the Empire was reduced to less than half. The rest of them went on fighting, killing, burning, and destroying. In the capital, some officers of what had been the proudest army of all time found a girl they said was the emperor’s daughter, sole survivor of the night of the assassins. Perhaps she was, perhaps she wasn’t. The girl took the throne, not among parades and fanfares but among flames and screams; once there she tried to impose order, first in the palace, then in the streets and houses of the city, and looked as if she might succeed. But the men in uniform got worried. If instead of being their puppet, this supposed daughter of the dead emperor strengthened her rule, none of them would get to be emperor. They did all they could to make sure her plans failed and her orders were disobeyed. And when they saw that the girl was cleverer and stronger than they’d expected, they met in secret and talked all one night. And she died. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know, nobody knows. She was very young and she may have been beautiful even though she’d lived so long in hiding, half starved. Her reign lasted fifty-four days.

Well, well, each of you has an imagination; not a very big one, or you wouldn’t need me; but you have one. So think about the death of the Empire. Look at the gutted cities, the burnt fields, the deserted streets; listen to the silence, the howl of the wind knocking loose stones from ruined buildings. There’s no food, there’s no drinkable water, no vehicles, no medicine or merriment or textbooks or music or communications or factories or banks or elegant shops or poets or storytellers. There’s nothing, not even a symbol of power to fight over: the Golden Throne is lost, it doesn’t exist, or if it does it’s buried under a mountain of broken bodies and rubbish. Even war is dead, and nothing’s left but oblivion. The population of the Empire is sparse, reduced to brutalized bands of nomads who wear rags torn from corpses and shelter under tottering walls that support only the remains of a roof; they eat what they can find, any animal they can catch, or, if winter deprives them even of that, they eat the weakest or unwariest of the band.

Excerpted from Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was by Angélica Gorodischer.