The Golden Age

The royal treasury

I am telling you the story just as I learned it on the island, in the full knowledge that little of this Book island, if anything of it, remains today. First to change was its environment. I remember receiving a telephone call from Karael several months after I had left the island; in those days we were still phoning and writing to each other quite often. When my cellphone rang I was walking under a leaden sky along a mud-spattered sidewalk among the tower blocks of Prague’s Jížní msto housing estate, looking for an electrical repair shop. Among other things, I asked Karael about the Book, and she told me something of its most recent changes. I learned that the town on Devel had in the course of several rewrites become gradually flatter, until it became a town of humble dwellings scattered about a marshy delta, the old camp of nomads who had stopped there on their way to the sea. The town was strung together around the mouth of a shallow brown river, where the tents reluctantly gave way to imperfect houses. In this version the conversation in which Hios advises Gato how to negotiate the labyrinth does not take place above the town but on its fringes; the princess and her lover are sitting at a ground-floor window from which they look upon the steppe, lit by the moon to the distant horizon. But I am not able to think of the town’s face as ever-changing, as the islanders can. My memory needs to select one face, one town from the many metamorphoses. So that time on the Jížní město estate, as a wind that reminded me of the island gusted between the tower blocks, I decided to take no notice of the town on the delta and to preserve in my memory the image of the town I had taken from my own reading of the Book.

The next day Gato hands the garden-carpet over to Taal. In the afternoon the celebration in the great hall is declared open, and Gato wastes no time in approaching the king and declaring his wish to negotiate the labyrinth on the door of the treasury. News of the wish expressed by the stranger travels in whispers in all directions and to every corner of the hall, killing all conversation so all that is heard is a murmur of curiosity, astonishment and dismay. Taal’s face has darkened; he says that anyone has the right to attempt to conquer the labyrinth, that Gato should remember the trap-door and the subterranean river, but he says nothing more. Gato leaves the hall immediately and makes his way along the corridor, which seems to him endless. A procession of silent courtiers tiptoes cautiously behind him, stretching back beyond the bend in the corridor. Whenever Gato turns, they stop mid-step, some of them leaning forward with a foot raised, the outstretched toes just touching the gleaming parquet. Gato remembers reading that the moment after death the soul recalls the last image it saw in life, and he says to himself, “What strange theatrics I shall look upon in the underworld if I confuse one of the moves!” But once he reaches the door to the treasury, he does not turn again. He takes the magnetic stone in his hand, and begins to recite the story of the caliph.

His anxiety does not leave him. At one moment he suspects the stone is moving away from the labyrinth’s centre and into a blind alley, and he asks himself if Hios has not betrayed him, if she has taken the side of her family against the stranger. Perhaps her coming to him in the night was part of a plan devised in collaboration with Uddo and Taal. He thinks back to some of things she told him, which seem to him now ambiguous and disquieting; he imagines Hios leaving his chamber and going straight to her father, how they share in laughter at his expense just as cruel as the laughter of Taal and Uddo over Nau’s sickness and Tana’s desperation. When in Hios’s telling the caliph climbed through a hole in the wall into the garden of a stranger’s house, where he was addressed from the dark of the summerhouse by an old Persian merchant, it almost seemed to him that she had changed the story on purpose: would it not have been more logical for the caliph to encounter a woman, not a man in a garden at night? He suffers anguish akin to torment as he considers whether to move the stone to the left rather than to the right, before at last he obeys Hios and goes right, and the floor beneath him remains firm.

But the caliph had many more encounters that night, with men and with women, and Gato has many more decisions to make and junctions to negotiate. After every move he waits for the floor to open up beneath him, plunging him down into the subterranean river; he feels something akin to disappointment when this does not happen, as he will have to persist in this unbearable anxiety. The thirtieth move has been made and still Gato stands on the polished parquet, but this is no comfort to him. He knows very well how cunning Taal can be, and becomes ever more certain that Hios and Taal are in league, that he has been told thirty-five right moves but that the thirty-sixth will open the trap-door to the chasm when he feels victory to be in his grasp.

When the moment arrives for him to make that last move, when the caliph has returned to his chamber and the clear Baghdad sky is bright with stars, Gato pauses with the stone in his hand. What if the figure in the semi-transparent veil waiting in the caliph’s bed is not the lovely daughter of the vizier? What if the story Hios has kept from him has the caliph pull back the bed-drapes to find a thief, who has broken into the palace that night and is waiting for the caliph with a sharp dagger in his hand? Gato stands there for a long time with the stone in his hand, deliberating whether to go left or right. But in the end he goes left, as Hios told him to, and closes his eyes. There is a creaking sound. Gato attempts to hold on to the relief work of the door, although he knows full well that this will do nothing to save him from the long fall. His hands slip on the smooth, rounded surfaces. His eyes closed, he falls. He feels the chill of the cave and he hears the chattering of the subterranean river.