The Golden Age

Putsch

Months later the news reaches Taal that Hios has become the lover of the commander of the palace’s praetorian guard. Taal flies into a rage and determines to question Hios at luncheon that day, but when he does Hios does nothing to refute the allegations. While her father rants and rages, she sits there calmly eating a peach. Suddenly Taal falls silent, begins to wheeze, and falls face-first into the crockery. Hios continues to bite into her peach, watching her bewildered mother flap around Taal. When no further sound comes from Taal, Hios throws the peach stone into her bowl and leaves for her room. Once it becomes clear to Uddo there is nothing more she can do for Taal, she runs through the long corridors in pursuit of her daughter. But at the door to her daughter’s chamber her way is blocked by two praetorians. She screams at them that she is the queen, but the guards hold their silence and do not move. She runs to her own chamber to find there six more guards going carefully through her things. Nor do they respond to her threats, and when they leave they take with them all the apparatus of her evil kitchen — all the flasks and jars of poisons, potions and drugs, all the instruments of her prowess as a chemist, which she would sit over for hour upon hour and compose for as though they were the most sophisticated musical instruments, concertos filled with pathos or dreams, nocturnes and preludes of evildoing. It seems that the putsch is proceeding along carefully prepared lines. As the praetorian guard takes the palace, others of its units occupy the Academy; but this is nothing more than a futile gesture of perfectionism on the part of the putschists, a small, unasked-for present to Hios from the praetorians, or perhaps a settling of old accounts. (There has always been a certain tension between the guard and the Academy, the two real centres of power on Devel.) Owing to the gradual disappearance over the past twenty years of centres of resistance to the government, the Academy has become somnolent; it has ceased to be a feared nest of the dark sciences and forces to such a degree that occasionally it returns to the innocent researches of old.

Surprisingly the command of the army puts up as little resistance as the weakened Academy. Years ago Taal promoted the palace guard to the position of most powerful force in the state, and this resulted in the de facto subjugation of the army. The guard does not have a hierarchy; it has the character of a strong but elastic web woven from dark bonds, impure dreams and complicity in old crimes. The guard has no code nor central idea, nor any specific purpose in the running of the state. The motto on its coat of arms is composed of incomprehensible, magic words for which everyone has his own interpretation. The guard is the ideal means of disseminating and enforcing decisions that should be spoken of only in whispers and ambiguous terms, decisions that grow from dark roots and grope about for means of implementation, even for guiding aims. The guard does not act by the passing down of clear commands through a hierarchy, but in such a way that its instructions — or rather the dark movements of its consciousness and emotions, spoken in low voices behind locked doors, in high galleries or the alleys of parks, in which tone of voice and accent play important roles — enter immediately the filiform web from which the body of the guard is woven; once these instructions are in circulation, the imagination of the great body sets to work on developing the dark themes within them, while simultaneously — as if in a single movement — turning them into action. This was the chemistry by which Taal exercised power; it was in many ways similar to his wife’s more intimate compositions, whose lifeblood was poison.

Only subsequently, once everything is in motion, are a design and a plan fashioned, and these are really little more than hallucinations. These visions, of which the guard takes so little notice, set the army in motion. The army itself has no sensory organs by which to perceive the tangle of forces, desires and chaos that glimmer behind these phantom constructions; the commanders of the army do not realize that orders are born out of whispers, twitches and dreams, that indeed they never move very far away from them. So the putsch under the leadership of Hios and the commander of the praetorians is not so very different from the way things have been for many years up to this point. Even while the coup is in progress, a sense of normality sets in, stirring in the army command a sense that law and order are at work. After all, Hios is the daughter of the late king, and it has always been so that the commander of the guard mediates between the palace and the army. Hence the army — whose intervention Uddo is relying on — does nothing. The system of power established by Taal is turned against Uddo, and the queen discovers that she is powerless to resist it.

Hios does not attempt to disavow the rumours that claim it was she who poisoned the king. The commander of the guard is prepared to do whatever Hios asks of him, and so are his men. Since the deaths of Gato and Taal, Hios has grown so beautiful that she seems to have pillaged all the jewels of hell. Her dark splendour holds the praetorians in thrall; any of them would willingly undergo torture and death for the sake of their lady. Life at the palace becomes uncanny and dreamlike. The guards now walk its corridors, sprawl on its expensive upholstery in their high riding boots, enter its halls and chambers without invitation. Everyone gets out of their way. Hios glows with an icy, deathly beauty; fear abounds in the chambers of the palace. Uddo retires to ever-more remote rooms, waiting for Hios to strike against her. Hios leaves her mother alone while she considers how to dispose of her. One night Uddo gathers her jewels and makes an attempt to leave the palace by a side gate, but the guards there silently refuse to raise the barrier. Uddo shouts at them, then breaks into sobs and offers them jewels and money, but none of them speak or step aside, so Uddo returns to her room.

Hios begins to rule over the palace and the island as a whole. She refuses the title of queen, although the praetorians, who love the lustre of ceremony and the sight of gaily-coloured uniforms in the light of the sun, persist in proposing a magnificent coronation. It is enough for Hios that everyone fears her. She has the gemstone fished out of the statue and sent to Tana on Illim; using this, Tana is able to wash the red coating off the marble panel and thus prepare the remedy for Nau, who begins to get softer as soon as the first drops are applied. But when Tana asks for the return of his son’s remains, Hios refuses to give up Gato’s skeleton. She commands that this stays in the statue, and every evening when it is lit by the setting sun and Gato’s silhouette comes into relief like a puppet in an Adriatic shadow theatre, she walks across the deserted courtyard and sits on a granite paving stone in front of the statue, where she remains until it is immersed in shade and Gato disappears.

One afternoon it suddenly grows dark and above the sea there appears a black column approaching the shore. The superstitious town-dwellers, whose streets are infected by the silent horror flowing from the palace, tell one another that the Devil has come for Hios. But it is nothing more than a tornado. When the whirling dance reaches the town, it rips off several roofs and tosses them into the air. It shakes the ships in the harbour, and — on reaching the palace — bores into the jelly statue like a giant screw, gathers it unto itself, bears the statue off towards the skies, then drops it — jelly, Gato’s skeleton, the predatory fish, and all — into the streets. Before the fish die of fright they manage to sink their teeth into a number of people who try to pick them up from the ground. Hios orders the collection of Gato’s remains, and these she has placed in the gold box, out of which she first ejects the manuscript of her brother’s book. Now she detests whoever has the same blood as she, whether living or dead. Then she gives the order that Mii be found and told that Hios has work for her. But Mii, who has experienced a religious crisis and become terrified of the world that gave birth to her visions, is by this time living somewhere in northern Europe, on the tundra and deep in the forest, making ephemeral statues out of ash, then watching the wind reshape them until they disappear. So Hios’s envoys bring to Devel the sculptor Nubra of Kass. When Mii was working on Fo’s palace and the statue in jelly, Nubra was one of her assistants, and after her departure he took over her workshop.