The Golden Age

The queen’s illness

The story of the feuding families was written on a strip of paper folded into one of the Book’s pockets; this pocket was inserted into a story about the adventures of an island prince, a character reminding one of Odysseus and Sinbad. One night a wicked jinni steals into the bedroom of his beloved wife and spirits her away. The prince spends twenty years at sea in a fast boat called the Dark Desperation, searching sinister islands and ill-boding coastlines. The end of this long section is rather strange even by the standards of the Book. After twenty years of roaming the prince finds his wife on a distant island of rock. She has been living here for many years alone in an empty palace by the shore: the jinni lives with each of his women for one year only, and he left her long ago.

In the beginning the woman is desperate with longing for her husband and her homeland. But over the years spent in seclusion on the island, she develops a love of solitude; she spends hour upon hour watching the ever-changing surface of the sea until she believes that she understands its script. These are the most beautiful letters in the world, and she never wearies of reading their wonderful messages. And so she spends her days on the shore in a state of rapture. The sudden appearance of her husband is unpleasant to her, as are the constant, noisy perambulations of his retainers on the paths and in the gardens of the palace. She is torn from her contemplations, dislocated from her dialogue with the ocean. She sulkily prepares her departure. But when the Dark Desperation is about to sail, she tells the prince she will be staying on the island. And the prince does not attempt to talk his wife out of her decision: for the several days of his stay on the jinni’s island he has found her indifference and eccentricity hard to bear. He realizes that he is glad to be leaving the island without her. Thus ends a twenty-year pilgrimage.

As the wife stands on the shore watching the boat disappear over the horizon, it seems that the prince is quitting the pages of the Book for good. After several days of unpleasantness, confusion and discomfort she is happy to return to her reading of the great manuscript of the sea. She whispers a declaration of love and a promise of fidelity to the sea; this Lautréamontesque ode to the ocean tells of the beauty of her lonely, husbandless, childless, friendless death on the moist sands amid the murmur of the waves. (Perhaps there is a direct influence at work here, but I am at a loss to identify it. It is not inconceivable that Isidore Ducasse stopped off on the island as he voyaged between Uruguay and France.) To the anti-social, solitary islanders this ending is far less scandalous than it would be to us.

But the story of the feuding families is set sometime earlier than the curious ending of the quest for the lost wife; the prince is still dreaming of reunion with his beloved, still scouring every coastline he can find. Most of the islands where he drops anchor are populated by monsters, cannibals or walking machines in metal coats which glow in the sun. Only once does he come across an amicable people with a welcoming, shaded palace. As he rests here a while the prince tells the island’s ruler and his family — in the manner of Odysseus in the palace of the Phaiakians or Aeneas in Carthage — of his homeland and his travels. The prince is descended from one of the warring families, so his story includes an account of the feud. The Book states: “For three days and three nights he recounted to the king and the queen the long, sad tale of the warring families.” Those readers who chose to let this sentence be and not to open the thick pocket which was inserted here, learned nothing about the feud; they spent two weeks on the hospitable island in the company of the hero, learned of his further adventures and then of their bewildering end. But those who did choose to open the pocket, as I did, were given the history of the feuding families of the archipelago. It includes an episode I would like, dear reader, to retell.

There are two islands, Illim and Devel. On the first there lives a king called Tana, on the second a king called Taal. There exists an enmity between the two royal houses. When Tana and Taal are still children, their fathers begin to tire of the same old naval battles joined in the cold of dawn, invasions mounted on sandy beaches (which memory makes an ongoing, dreamlike struggle), punitive expeditions to the humid jungles of the hills in search of guerillas (goaded to do so by the enemy) — and so they negotiate a tired peace. With time weariness and resignation give way to a kind of tolerance and respect, and so it comes to pass that Taal and Tana spend their youth together at the court of a Gallic king and become friends. But it seems that the ill-will has never dissolved, just lain dormant in the blood; once roused, it takes sustenance from an ages-old, bounteous source — love for a woman and the jealousy and abasement with which this is imbued. Perhaps the hatred awakes of its own accord, finds a woman to please it and stage-manages a drama in which it resumes the reins of power, makes itself joyfully manifest in words and gestures and streams into all thoughts and acts. Tana and Taal fall in love with the Gallic princess Nau, who hesitates between them for a while before expressing a preference for Tana. Tana takes her with him to Illim. When some time later his father dies, Tana becomes the island’s ruler and Nau his queen.

Taal returns to Devel, where shortly he marries the beautiful Uddo, whom he also knows from Gaul and who rumour has it was implicated in a poisoning affair when she was only fourteen. Such a spare characterization is of little use for my retelling. In this part of the Book the unknown author says nothing more about Uddo, although in the scenes in which she appears lengthy descriptions of the patterns and fabrics of her clothing and of her jewels are provided. These descriptions are made in the shadows of pockets whose contents relate the history of the lands where the fabrics are woven and give details of the lives of the artists who chiselled the jewels. (Have no fear, dear reader — I will exclude these descriptive passages from my retelling.) The faces of all the figures in the Book are veiled in a fog; around this void fabrics flutter, scents waft and jewels twinkle. I considered painting faces on the characters of the tale before deciding not to force masks on them and so conceal the emptiness they are used to.

Uddo hates Nau, and the evil influence she works on the embittered Taal grows stronger with the years. On Devel, well-paid court poets laud Uddo’s erudition. When at twenty-three the dazzlingly beautiful wife of the king is appointed president of the Devel Academy, an assembly of venerable old men who have dedicated their lives to science, jokes are cracked on all the islands of the archipelago. But the jesters are in error — Uddo has an extensive knowledge of chemistry, transformation in metals, runes, augury, archaeology, metaphysics, geometry, architecture, statics, boat-building and building of labyrinths, demonology, astronomy and haruspicy. In these sciences Uddo’s learning exceeds that of the academicians by far. (She acquired it at schools of the dark sciences of which it is better not to speak. All that is heard of these are rumours — and they may be nothing more than recollections of dreams — of night-time lectures delivered in whispers in dark rooms furnished with mountains of cushions and pillows for the students and teachers, who drift in and out of sleep.) There is no doubt that Uddo takes her duties at the Academy seriously — within very few years she turns it into a kind of secret society, something between an alchemist’s workshop and the Cosa Nostra.

At the time our story begins, Tana and Nau and have not seen Taal and Uddo for twenty-five years. In all that time there have been occasional discoveries on Illim of spies and mischief-makers from Devel, but the wary peace between the two islands has never fractured to such an extent as to excite open conflict. One day Tana receives a letter from Taal in which the latter expresses the wish that he and Uddo be reconciled with Tana and Nau. Tana answers immediately with a long letter of his own, in which he invites Taal and Uddo to Illim. Since the time of his break with Taal he has had no real friends, and in the evenings over a glass of wine he often looks back with fondness on the happy times they spent together in Gaul. Such is his joy at Taal’s letter that he pays no attention to various tales abroad in the archipelago which speak of Uddo’s murderous chemistry and Taal’s dark sonatas of power, whose darkest chords are played by his paramilitary guard. At this time Tana’s son Gato is twenty-four and he is a student in Gaul, where he is living with his mother’s parents. Fo, the son of Taal and Uddo, who was born in the same year as Gato, died four years ago; Fo’s sister Hios is seventeen. It seems that the names of both princes and the princess are mentioned in the text only incidentally — Gato and Hios are many miles from Illim and Fo is dead, so none of them will be playing any part in the action. Still we wonder if they might be important for the story — perhaps one of its strands will contrive for the wanderers to meet, or the action will return to a time when the deceased was still living.

Presently Tana and Nau are down at the harbour to welcome the galleon from Devel. They embrace Taal and Uddo, who for many days will be their guests at the palace. Every evening the four of them sit on a balcony above the trees of the garden, looking back on the days they spent together on Gaul and talking of their islands. It seems that these evenings serve to dissolve all remnants of resentment and ill-will between them. At this time Nau begins to be troubled by a strange illness. One morning she realizes that the skin of her right hand has stiffened, lost feeling and acquired a bluish hue; over the next few days she observes with alarm how these changes progress. Within two weeks the skin has become a smooth, grey-blue shell in which the queen is held captive: Nau is walled in in her own body. She has become a statue of herself, unable to move, unable to speak or even eat. Fortunately the hardening has not attacked her inner organs, so she can swallow pulped food when it is poured carefully into her mouth. The only feature of her outer body which is not grey and immobile is her eyes — two terrified, twitching larvae set in the heavy metal her skin has become. Whenever Tana carries his queen in his arms he watches in the smooth surface of the new metal distorted reflections of the palace — sagging columns, bloated window frames, soft networks of chequered corridors; when he leans in close to her round, gleaming, pitted face he sees in it a grotesque caricature of his own.

Tana takes meticulous care of Nau. He dresses her as if she were an enormous marionette; he carries her into the garden; every evening he bathes her and lays her next to him in their bed. He summons the most celebrated physicians, each of whom recommends a different treatment — one has Nau’s shell of a body coated in rose oil, another daubs it with ass’s milk, another fills the room with smoke produced from the wood of trees that grow on distant Formos. The physicians come and go, but the queen’s shell becomes not the tiniest bit softer. Taal and Uddo declare themselves extremely concerned. Taal summons his court physician, who applies to Nau’s body over several weeks a decoction of Develian herbs. But it seems to Tana that all these cures only serve to make Nau’s skin harder still.