Caspar hated the Palace more than he hated the city; it provoked in him, in exaggerated form, the same uneasiness. For more than a year after his conquest he had slept in one of his people’s felt huts, reared in the Palace gardens, and he would have been sleeping there still but for a rumour that had reached him. The people of Jexal were saying that he dared not sleep in the Palace because he was afraid of the spirits of the old kings. On the night of the day when that rumour reached him he had moved into the Palace and slept in the vast bed, all golden posts and silken hangings, in which the last king of Jexal had slept on the night that had ended with a bloody dawn. He’d slept there alone, lying down as he always did in his tent, wearing his leather breeches and with his sword to hand. With the doors wide open and the window unshuttered it had not been too unbearable, had not inflicted too great an outrage upon his distaste for houses, his dread of being shut in. ” In former days one wing of the Palace had housed Palace officials; there were hardly any left now and the apartments were occupied by members of the Five’ Hundred who were unmarried, or whose wives were amenable to communal life. Some women had preferred houses of their own and they had had wide choice of the splendid establishments formerly occupied by Jexalian grandees.
Another wing had been given over’ to administrative offices. Caspar had reduced officials to the minimum, he had seen no reason why a man who checked the market dues shouldn’t pour himself a glass of wine when he wanted one, or why customs officers needed uniformed public servants to help them on with their shoes. The administrative service was now much depleted and about three times as efficient as it had been.
One official Caspar had retained. He had been known as the Grand Vizier, and he was still the Vizier, but no longer Grand. He was fat and flabby, as all officials—indeed most Jexalians past first youth—tended to be, but he had his wits about him. He’d been cunning
enough to hide himself well away when thecity was sacked, and sensible enough to appear before Caspar wearing a plain brown woollen robe, and lucky enough to speak the tongue of the ordinary people who had dealings with the country dwellers. True he spoke it with a lisping refinement, but it was understandable; and what he said made sense. He had said, “Lord, you have taken this city. Fifty miles down the river stand the ruins of a city similarly taken when my grandfather’s grandfather was a young man. Trade died there and the people perished or fled. A few goats now graze there amongst the fallen stones.”
“I know it. I have camped there.”
“A city lives by its trade,” the Vizier said.
“And trade needs men who can read and write and keep accounts and make visitors feel welcome and safe. Fighting men are not shaped for such work.”
That was true, Caspar reflected. And although he hated the city and all its ways, he had taken it, he knew, because he wanted it. As it was, rich and prosperous. Who wanted to be master of a mass of deserted ruins? What he wanted, he realised, was an ideal city, rich and prosperous, lively and flourishing, but not soft and decadent. So there and then he and the Vizier had made their bargain, and it had worked out very well; the Vizier had traded in his former grandeur and its accompanying insecurity for a less obvious but far more real power and Caspar had, here and there, abrogated part of his authority, saying, “Maybe you know best about that.” Jexal Sad continued to flourish.
In former days whenever the King of Jexal had moved in or out of the Palace there had been a great commotion; trumpeters had blown upon their silver trumpets, attendants had stood, evenly matched on each side of the twelve shallow steps. Caspar had done away with all that. The small cavalcade clattered into the space between the fountains and the serried cypresses flanking the Palace steps and Caspar swung himself from the saddle and left his horse to the boy who had come running. The others, reining in, prepared to disperse. Caspar waited until Lakma, with the girl uncomfortably perched on the saddle before him, drew level, and then put his hand on the man’s knee.
“I wish you joy,” he said, and turned, and began to mount the Palace steps which were so shallow that any active man must take them three at a time.
His Vizier was waiting for him, ready to report upon what had happened in the departments for which he was responsible during the last ten days. None of it was important. He had never been able to rid his manner of servility, but at least he had learned to stand upright and speak like a man, and not to keep saying “Lord’. He ended his account by saying:
“Benjamin, the carpet merchant arrived yesterday. Is it your wish to ask him to supper?”
Caspar brightened. He liked the old Jew who visited Jexal every second year with a long train of handsome mules and went away laden with the choicest products of Jexal’s looms. On Benjamin’s former visit he had been scornful of the Vizier’s suggestion that he should receive the old man.
“A carpet pedlar!” he had exclaimed.
“He buys our best,” the Vizier had explained.
“He is a man of substance, noted for his honesty. He is also a speaker of tongues and a great carrier of news. As you say, a carpet pedlar, but an aristocrat of pedlars.”
“That would be something to see I Caspar had said.
“Ask him to supper.” They’d had much interesting conversation then, and he now looked forward to another.
“But two years! How fast time flew in a place where it was reckoned; in the desert, with little to mark one day from another, it had moved slowly.
“And, Lord, there is one other thing,” the Vizier said.
“Yes?” He spoke sharply, knowing that nowadays the Vizier only used the honorific term when broaching matters of importance—in his own eyes at least.
“The boy, Malchus, very humbly asks if you could spare him a moment of your precious time.”
“Malchus?” For a second Caspar was at a loss; then he remembered. The old king had had several wives and the youngest of them, when the city was raided, had hidden herself and her two children; they had remained in hiding for a week, and when they were discovered the blood-lust had
been appeased.The girl, Ilya, had been twelve or thirteen then, the boy some two years younger, and Caspar had said, more in contempt than charity, “I don’t make war on children!” And that, he now reflected sourly, had cost him the use of a finger, for it was the girl, Ilya, whom that fool Lakma had wanted to marry.
“What does he want with me ? If my memory serves I told his mother to apprentice him to a useful trade.”
“She did so,” the Vizier said in a voice carefully void of all expression. He could remember the two beautiful, pampered children, their old father’s darlings, petted by competitive courtiers and officials, Prince Malchus and Princess Ilya…..Four years ago, and in another world.
“He works as a smith. He chose that, being fond of horses.”
“Very sensible. And what does he want from me? Permission to set up his own business?”
How he bristles, the Vizier thought, at any mention or reminder of the old days in Jexal.
“He did not state his business. Today is the spring Festival of the Horse, and although it is no longer a public holiday—by your command—the smithies are idle. So he came and I allowed him to wait and said that I would tell you he was here.”
“I’ll see him,” Caspar said.
“In the Balcony Room.” It was the only place in the whole huge Palace in which he felt moderately at ease, and that was because, strictly speaking it was not a room at all; it was a bulge in the corridor which led to the private royal apartments. Once, more than five hundred years earlier, a Queen of Jexal had paused there, looked through the lacy marble of the wall and seen beyond the cypresses and the flowers of the garden and the green river tumbling down. It was, she had declared, the best view obtainable from the whole Palace. Her doting husband had had the wall removed, the floor extended, so that she might the better enjoy her view. The doted-upon Queen and the King who had doted upon her were long since dead and forgotten; for many of their successors the balcony had been only a draughty place, to be hurried through, between the public audience chambers and the private rooms; but Caspar had seized upon it as a place where he could feel moderately at ease and not suffer the shut in, stifled feeling that the rest of the Palace inflicted.