The Golden Age

The quest for the gemstone

Three weeks after the flight of Taal and Uddo, Gato returns to Illim. When she was still able to move her hardening lips a little, Nau asked Tana not to write to Gato about her illness; she did not want her son to see her transforming into a piteous, gleaming tortoise. But after a time, and in spite of Tana’s best efforts to censor this, news of the queen’s condition reaches Gaul, and Gato sets sail for his island home as soon as he hears it. Then the moment he learns of the hidden inscription and the gemstone at Taal’s palace, he announces his intention to leave for Devel; he will find and bring back the gemstone. Gato paces the sand-strewn paths of the park deep into the night. When Tano wakes from a restless sleep, he hears beneath his window the repeated crunch of the sand. In the course of this sleepless night, Gato devises a plan for how to gain entry to the palace of Taal and Uddo.

Gato’s plan is based around the fact that no one at Taal’s court knows what he looks like; also, it draws on a strange art that Gato learned in a land where his ship was once washed ashore while on its way to Gaul. Next to the name of this land there was one of those thick pockets I came to think of as “geographical-historical.” It contained details of the territory and its history, interwoven — as was common in the Book—with the psychopathology of its ruling family, again expressed by images from mythology — conspiracy, erotically-motivated revenge, incest, battles at sea, intrigue and uprising, sharp daggers under pillows, faithless women consorting with enemies of the family, dragons in palace gardens at night, high politics discussed in bed chambers, catalogues of poisons seeping through the closed world of the family, inscriptions on walls in scripts unknown, the rising sun shining bright on warriors’ blades. But as this is of no great importance to our story, let us leave this pocket closed.

The land on whose coast Gato disembarked was celebrated for its carpets, which were more magnificent than the most beautiful works of Persia and Bukhara. Its people wove carpets from fine but strong fibres spun by a special species of spider which lived off great butterflies in mountain forests. The spiders had two means of attracting the butterflies: by giving off an intoxicating scent, and by a chemical reaction that was actuated in their fibres by early morning sun (when the butterflies flew out), causing the webs to take on the most glorious colours. Each spider would spin fibres of a different colour, as the colour of a web also had the function of marking its territory. The fineness and strength of the fibres made it possible to portray on the carpets the subtlest of details. The people of this land wove into their carpets vedute of towns in which it was possible to count the number of stones on the bracelets of women walking in the streets; there were carpets with battle panoramas in which were clearly visible teeth in the grimacing mouths of warriors, and carpets showing jungles where each stalk of grass and each colour in a parrot’s crest were carefully distinguished.

A popular genre was the so-called “lost portrait.” Having commissioned a master weaver to produce his likeness, the client would some time later receive a carpet that showed, for example, a large town in which there were thousands of figures in the streets and at the windows. One of these figures was a portrait of the client, but in order to find it, it was necessary to look very hard. The longer this search took — and it might take months or even years — the more highly the work was prized. The carpet weavers employed a number of tricks: after several years of intensive searching, one client found his own face reflected dimly on the lid of somebody’s snuff-box, while another found himself painted on a crumpled chocolate-bar wrapper lying on a rubbish heap. A carpet which made use of Poe’s principle of the “Lost Letter” was particularly celebrated. This depicted a painter showing his girlfriend a picture mounted on his easel, that of a town. The town was extraordinarily elaborate and there was a fantastic number of figures in the streets and parks and on the squares and bridges. The client studied the picture for many years, taking in every figure and every nook and cranny, until one morning he found his portrait in the large face of the painter in the foreground.

Yet the carpets fascinated most by their marvellous daily metamorphoses. The fibres retained all characteristics of the spider’s web: all night and for most of the day they were snow-white in colour, but when the first dim rays of sun heralded the dawn they gave off their acute scent and then wonderful pictures began to paint themselves across the white surfaces. The first marks to appear on the white fabric were red and white, but they were followed slowly by the rest of the colours. Each picture would shine for an hour or so, after which time the colours would begin gradually to fade, until the carpet returned to white and remained thus until the next morning. Poetically, the natives called such works “dreaming carpets”: they imagined that for a short time at dawn the carpets had colourful dreams before falling back into the heavy, dreamless sleep of objects.

Gato was enchanted by the carpets. Because of them not only did he remain in this strange land for a whole year but he undertook to learn the subtleties of the carpet-maker’s art in one of its most celebrated binder’s workshops. When he sails away he takes his journeyman’s work with him — its picture that of a castle perched atop a rock which rises out of a lake. The castle has many towers and turrets, one growing out of another and all joined to little arched bridges. (On one of these bridges Gato has depicted himself as a figure standing by a balustrade contemplating the bizarre shapes of the clouds in the distance.)

Gato sails off to Devel in disguise, over his shoulder a rolled-up carpet whose white fabric conceals the picture of his dreamlike castle, in his travel bag a collapsible weaver’s loom and a ball of spider-spun fibre. As in the half-light of evening the ship pulls in to port at Devel, Gato is standing at the prow, leaning on the rail, looking at the grey, hostile town with its steep, winding streets that reach from the harbour to the walls of the gardens of the royal palace. All but one of these streets turns back the way it has come; this street has succeeded in extricating itself from the tangled knot, reaching beyond the last houses of the town right to the gates of the great gloomy palace. Having passed the night on the jetty, Gato sets off for the palace before sunrise. The day begins early at the palace, and Gato is immediately admitted to the presence of a chamberlain; there he rolls out the carpet moments before the red flags on the turrets of the castle and the masts of the boats on the lake become visible together with the great red flowers and emerald-green leaves of the trees on the bank.

The chamberlain watches with delight as the magical castle emerges; before the last of the coloured marks has appeared he rushes to show this wonder to the king. The king has Gato brought to him and immediately buys the carpet. By the time the castle and the lake begin to dissolve an hour later, Gato has been appointed court carpet-binder and a servant in livery has led him along a long passage to his chamber, where he is to work on his first commission. Taal wishes him to weave for his daughter Hios a carpet that will show a garden of paradise with fountains, artificial waterfalls, alleys, summerhouses, gaily-coloured birds and winsome beasts. Once Gato is alone in the large, well-lit room he steps to the window. He sees below him the tops of the trees of the palace gardens, and further below still, the grey pitched roofs of the houses in the streets that slope down to the harbour, and beyond these the light strip of the sea.