The Golden Age

Taal’s task

Fo was carried into the palace with his book. After Fo’s death, Taal has his son’s work published in many thousands of copies and instructs everyone on the island to buy it. In addition to this, the king has several copies produced on the finest handmade paper as facsimile publications; these are kept in leather cases set with red, green and violet gemstones. Fo’s lettering is faithfully transcribed in all its transformations, and on the back of the sheets Fo’s text is woven around the lines of the forester’s records, just as it was in the cabin. The facsimile describes not only the story of the unfortunate Dru but also the story of Fo’s script, which is beautiful in its early guises but becomes ever more distorted as the fever takes hold. The letters were infected by the diseases of Fo’s thoughts, but perhaps the letters stirred the sickness in Fo by the piercing gaze they fixed upon him. The facsimile told of the fates of letters that became more and more akin to demons; these demons became lords of the text, shuddering, fraying and shrivelling until they were transformed into the monstrous letters of Umurian (woven somnambulistically around the clumsy letters of the woodsmen). Taal has Fo’s original manuscript placed in a gold box that he has specially made for it, and this is placed in the treasury guarded by the deadly, impassable labyrinth.

The king’s pain suddenly transforms into hatred for the woman he believes to be the cause of Fo’s death. One day he summons Mii to the audience chamber. This vast darkened hall seems to Mii to be empty as she makes her way across it; only when she is almost at its end does she see a slight movement in the gloom. Taal speaks. Since the death of his son, Taal has avoided the light. Curtains are drawn across windows and shawls thrown over lamps. The weary voice that comes out of the nest of shadows tells Mii it wishes her to honour Fo’s memory by the creation of a statue that depicts one of the scenes in his novel. This time the sculptress lacks the courage to refuse. She senses that Taal wishes to destroy her, that Taal would welcome her refusal as justification for her imprisonment or execution. There is a long silence during which nothing moves in the gloom. The audience appears to be at an end, so Mii curtseys and begins her retreat across the long, empty hall.

But she knows how cunning Taal can be and of his liking for the staging of dark, sinister acts, so the feeling of disquiet does not leave her. And before she reaches the door, Taal speaks again.

“There’s something important I forgot to mention. I spent a long time considering which material you should work in.” Mii has stopped and turned back. She knows she is about to learn what evil plan Taal has thought up. “I ruled out all varieties of stone and metal. I spent a lot of time considering rare woods, but all of them seemed too crude for a statue that should be an expression of the soul of my son. In the end I decided to have the statue made of water. You have three months in which to complete it. You may start work immediately.”

“You wish me to make a statue out of water?” Mii’s dismayed voice calls out into the dark towards where she believes Taal to be.

“Indeed. And of course I don’t mean snow or ice. Nor will I allow the water to be in any container that gives the statue its shape. But I suppose the material needn’t be water. Any liquid will do. I would quite like a statue made of aromatic oils, but I shall leave the choice to you. There’s surely no need for me to tell you that failure to obey the royal command is punishable by death.”

Mii knows this very well. She knows, too, that there is no point objecting that it is impossible to make a statue out of water or any other liquid, so she does not even attempt this. There she stands in the middle of the hall thinking desperately what she should do, but it seems to her she has no alternative but to wait in Taal’s palace for three months for death to arrive. But then something comes to her from deep in her memory; it contains the germ of an idea (at first foggy, but becoming ever clearer) for how Taal might be outsmarted. Mii knows that she must somehow get Taal to modify the task without ever suspecting there is a trick involved. She must induce the king to make a small change to the commission that will appear to him as nothing more than a meaningless elaboration, and she must get him to do so before she quits the hall. She begins to speak before she has a clear idea of how to proceed; her plan comes into being as she describes it in words. She walks back through the hall towards Taal; her voice is weak because she is more used to whispering to marble statues than to conversing with people. To begin with she is practically shouting, but still the king must lean forward so that he can hear her, and in so doing his face emerges from the darkness. The closer Mii gets to the king, the quieter her voice becomes. The king falls back into his armchair and the darkness.

“Very well, Your Majesty, I’ll try to make a statue out of some kind of liquid,” she says as she walks. “But there is one thing I need to get straight before I start working. There are thicker liquids and runnier pastes, aren’t there? What I mean to say is that it is not always clear where to draw the line between what is a liquid and what is a solid, and I wouldn’t like to think we might argue this point once the statue is finished. I suggest we agree beforehand what we consider a liquid on the basis of a simple and clear criterion, such as…” (as she walks, Mii pretends to be pondering on this) “…such as whether fish are able to live in the material the statue is made of.”

By now Mii is again standing before Taal’s chair, hidden though it is by the dark. Her plan for how to escape death was completed when she spoke her last word and took her last step. Taal is mistrustful and he takes a while to consider her proposal, but he finds nothing in it that could make the statue any easier to produce and thus jeopardize his intentions; on the contrary, it seems to Taal that in her panic Mii has made the task still harder for herself. So he replies, “Very well, it is your task to create a statue from a material in which fish are able to live.” He promises Mii that no one apart from her assistants will see the statue until it has been completed. Then he dismisses her.

As she stood before the king, Mii was remembering a marvellous lake that was hidden high in the hills of the small island on which she spent her childhood. After thousands of years of a gradual drying out, the water of this lake thickened into a kind of jelly. In the lake there lived predatory fish that darted out of the water to feed on birds that came too close to the surface. The fish would bite into the birds and pull them into the jelly, before stripping off all the flesh so that only the skeleton remained. Because it had taken such a long time for the water to thicken, the fish had had plenty of time to adapt to the changing conditions. Unlike the African lungfish (protopterus annectens) — which has created some kind of ersatz lungs for itself and will soon drown in water if it cannot get to the air above the surface — they did not convert to the breathing of atmospheric oxygen; the fish of the lake still breathed with their gills, which had adapted themselves entirely to the jelly and were very well able to exploit the small quantities of oxygen the jelly contained. It was difficult to decide whether the nimble movement of the fish in the jelly was swimming or burrowing. (The burrows disappeared immediately, of course, because the jelly closed as soon as the fish had passed through it — if you find this difficult to picture, try moving a spoon about in a blancmange.) Mii knows that the jelly is solid enough to make a statue out of, as the villagers living around the lake make quaking jelly statues for sale at the market in the capital.