The Golden Age

Luminous letters

The royal palace has a square ground plan. Its rooms are on seven floors and entered from seven arcaded galleries joined by a staircase. The galleries enclose an inner courtyard, where a fountain surrounded by palm trees spurts water continuously. The tops of the palms reach to the third gallery. One warm night of a full moon Tana is unable to sleep, and he sees from the movements of Nau’s eyes that she, too, is awake. So he carries his hardened queen from the room with the same care as if she were a priceless statue. Their bed-chamber is on the seventh, highest floor of the palace. In the dark gallery Tana leans his queen against the wall and lets her breathe in the fragrance of the summer night. He sits down on a stone bench beside her, takes up his telescope and studies the moon, which is illuminating the slim columns of the arcades and is reflected in the metal statues of the galleries. The room of Taal and Uddo is on the opposite side of the gallery, and next to this, in an alcove, there is a circular aquarium in which the water is rippling and lit blue by a medusa. This was a gift to Nau from an envoy of the Emperor of China and she keeps it as a kind of living jewel. Apart from the glow of the moon and weak blue light of the medusa — which is like the flame of a gas burner in the wind — the sleeping palace is in complete darkness. (That one story of the Book should tell of Gaul, galleries and telescopes, alchemy and chemistry is an anachronism characteristic of all its parts. The authors of the Book do not use anachronism with any particularly sophisticated intent; they do not use it in conjuring tricks like Jünger or Gracq. Anachronism in the Book tends to be employed carelessly, even naively, and at times it is not even clear whether it appears through negligence, playfulness or a simple ignorance of history.)

Suddenly Tana becomes aware of a muted conversation. Then two shadows appear in the gallery opposite; they flitter about for a while before coming to rest next to the medusa’s aquarium. Tana recognizes the voices of Taal and Uddo. His guests from Devel are too far away for him to understand what they are saying, but he identifies in their tone an evil gaiety which regularly gives way to quiet laughter. Tana is shocked to hear them laughing at a time when all voices in the palace are muffled in sadness. The suspicion is roused in him that the visit of Taal and Uddo to Illim is a mission of evil, an act of treachery that will bring in its wake a new war. There is no way of his approaching his guests so that he might eavesdrop on their conversation — any movement in their direction would be picked up by the moonlight. They would be alerted, too, by the calls of the birds whose cages line the arcades.

Then he makes the happy realization that there is one way in which he can find out what his guests are talking about. Once he, Nau, and Gato were standing in a dimly lit room admiring the beautiful, luminous dance of the medusa when they noticed that the medusa gave an answer to every sound by means of a special movement. Plainly it was able to distinguish the ripple frequency of different sounds and for some reason it would react to a given wave with the same movement each time. (At this point in my reading, the text sprouted one of its “zoological” pockets. These were attached to a page wherever a new species of animal made its first appearance in the Book. There were insertions in these pockets that described the anatomy of the animal, its behaviour and habitat, and how it hunted its prey. Sometimes recipes were recorded in which the flesh of the animal was the main ingredient.) Tana, Nau, and Gato often played a game in which one of them stood next to the aquarium and whispered something while the others tried to work out from the movements of the medusa what had been said. So now, from the other side of the gallery, Tana trains his telescope on the aquarium and sets to reading the luminous blue transcript of Taal and Uddo’s conversation. The medusa delivers this tirelessly, carefully, and always accurately.

Within a few moments Tana is quite appalled. He learns that Taal and Uddo’s amiability is a disguise. His evil guests conspired to put powder from Uddo’s witch’s kitchen in Nau’s wine-glass, and it is this that has turned Nau into a gleaming blue-grey statue. It seems that the plan was devised by Uddo, who has never desisted in her hatred of Nau, and that she persuaded the hesitant Taal to put it into practise. Up there in the gallery Taal asks Uddo if one day a physician might appear on Illim who would find a cure for Nau; laughing, Uddo assures him this is quite out of the question. The formula of the medicine that would restore Nau to her original form is known by her and her alone; it is composed of forty-four ingredients, and if but one of these is missing the medicine has no effect whatever. Then she begins to itemize the ingredients. Tana quickly pulls off his ring, then takes the telescope in his left hand and puts it to his eye; his right hand moves across one of the marble panels laid in the wall, inscribing into it the names of the substances by means of the diamond set in the ring.

When Taal and Uddo start to make fun of Nau’s carapace, referring to her as the Illim Tortoise, Tana’s anger gets the better of him; he sprints through the dark gallery towards his enemies. On reaching them he grabs Taal by the throat and pushes him to the floor before proceeding to choke him, all the time shouting that the despicable plan will fail because he has recorded all ingredients of the antidote in the marble of the wall. The medusa’s frantic, luminous letters write Tana’s cries into the dark, but no one takes the trouble to read them. For a few moments Uddo stands over the two kings as they scramble about the floor in each other’s clutches, just watching. Then she lifts from the wall one of the bronze shields that an unimaginative palace decorator has had hung in each of the corridors and dashes it against Tana’s head.

Stunned, Tana falls flat on his face. The calls of the birds ring out and the palace is stirring from sleep; in the lower galleries strips of light appear and then vanish; there is the sound of voices and footfalls on the stairs. When he sees guards running up the stairs towards them, Taal begins to panic, but Uddo — for whom villainy has always been an exact science — keeps a cool head. Within seconds the troops are in the seventh-floor gallery. Uddo tells them that thieves have broken into the palace; it was they who inflicted the injury on Tana when he caught them red-handed. Now they are hiding in the rooms of the lower floors. As soon as the men leave, Uddo picks up the aquarium with the luminous medusa as if it were a lantern and carries it to the opposite side of the gallery. In the restless blue light she examines the wall. Nau is still propped up against the wall like a broken beam. Uddo lifts the aquarium to the level of her adversary’s face and watches with satisfaction as the terrified eyes flit to and fro in the distorted, radiant-blue mirror. Then Uddo continues her inspection of the wall until she finds the inscription in the marble.

Uddo always wears a little white pouch on her waist. Theories and rumours abound as to its contents. I can divulge that it contains a first-aid package for use in everyday situations of difficulty in which Uddo might have cause to find herself. For Uddo everyday situations include betrayal, intrigue, blackmail, poisoning and mortal combat. Concealed in the pouch are five sachets made of fine paper, the colours of their powders showing through. Among these is the white powder that brought about Nau’s illness. Now Uddo pulls out a sachet of red powder. Then she fishes the medusa out of its aquarium and drops it onto the paved floor. For a few moments the medusa squirms pitifully; then its light goes out. Uddo pours the powder into the aquarium before throwing its transformed contents at the marble panel.

As it trickles down the panel, the red liquid obscures the ingredients of Tana’s transcription. The red solidifies rapidly until all that remains of the inscription is thirteen isolated letters on islets of grey. Uddo might easily obliterate these, but she leaves them exposed as an act of malice, imagining Tana standing over them, trying desperately to piece together the words they grew out of. Uddo looks approvingly on her work, this poem of hate made up of thirteen lost letters; then she turns to Nau and leans against her, knocking her over. The queen hits the slabs with a boom and proceeds to roll along the corridor; Nau rattles down the first staircase and then the second, knocking the marble and bronze statues of the galleries out of her path as if they were skittles. Soon she is pursued by a booming herd of rolling statues. The last of the staircases flings her towards the fountain; she is dashed against its metal base, which rings like a bell, then caught and deluged by statues.

At the place which told of Uddo’s pouch, there was an unusually fat pocket. I opened this in the expectation it would contain details of the countries of origin, composition and preparation of the medicaments concealed in the individual sachets. But there was an altogether different explanation for the pocket’s bulk. The author was having a joke at the reader’s expense: instead of describing the contents of the sachets, he had filled the pocket with small-scale representations. (The reader’s initial confusion was compounded by the fact that the pockets of the Book were practically the same colour and shape as Uddo’s pouch.) The five sachets of the Book reminded me of tea-bags; powders of five different colours were visible inside them. Having read this passage, Karael decided she would change it. (Her replacement was more of a thriller, in which the struggle was joined by two tamed cheetahs kept by Tana in the palace.) While she was at it, Karael tore off the pocket with the miniatures of Uddo’s sachets. I kept it as a souvenir and I still have it packed away somewhere.

While Tana is still unconscious, Taal and Uddo leave the palace and head back to Devel; in all the confusion no one spares them a second thought. As soon as he regains consciousness, Tana sets up a search party for Nau, which scours the palace all night before discovering Nau under the pile of statues by the fountain. It soon becomes apparent that there is no tool in existence that is powerful enough to scratch the coating of red from the marble panel nor any solvent that is effective against it. Tana offers a reward to anyone who can invent such a tool or solvent, yet still he does not lose hope that he will remember the ingredients he was told by the blue light of the medusa. Gradually he calls to mind thirty of them, but of course this is not enough for the creation of the antidote. He wanders the palace oblivious. Before his eyes there are thirteen swirling letters; these summon other letters in an unceasing swarm, forming thousands of real and non-existent words that always disintegrate. One day a fugitive Devel academician arrives on Illim. This scientist has some familiarity with Uddo’s murderous chemistry and is able to give Tana details of a solution guaranteed to dissolve the red coating on the marble panel. The substances needed for the production of the solution prove relatively easy to find, but the liquid becomes active only after a certain red gemstone has been submerged in it for several days. Only one such gemstone is known to be in existence, and sad to say this is in a casket that belongs to Taal.