The King and his Astronomer(After Italo Calvino)
Lara Alonso Corona 3100 words These all read like love stories, you complain to me in your latest message. Well, here’s another one, from one of the glittering gems that form what we know as the Glass Worlds. Perhaps the story is a little softer than the rest I’ve told you. The story of how I came to know the desert at night. The story of the king and his astronomer. Let me tell you: the magic of Tibiria, the last planet in the constellation of Ono, does not lie in the fact that every year it changes its capital, but in the reason behind this practice, which has been going on for generations. As a privileged observer, I was allowed to accompany the young king Merengeni into the deep bowels of the desert to carry out this royal task. As the place did not receive many visitors, and as I was equipped with technology of undoubtedly central origin, I was treated as if I were a prestigious diplomat. Don’t laugh at the idea of me as an ambassador, hear me out first. It was only the second time that this dazzling new king had made this change of capital, and the first time it was necessary to consult astronomers because, according to custom, the first capital after a change of reign should be established in the town where the previous monarch was born. There seemed to be an excitement in the air, an anticipation of where this ruler would make his home next. It seemed like a happy occasion. From what I could observe in the streets and among the humblest people, the new monarch enjoyed a popularity that could not be attributed merely to his handsomeness. In Tibiria there are 154 names for the sandstorms, and the most precious literary legacy of this planet are the 154 sonnets written in honor of each name. At their coronation, each king has to read a sonnet of their choice to pay homage to these precious and foreboding storms: those that create the landscape and alter it, those that bring danger and confusion, but those that are always beautiful. The current king earned a reputation for sentimentality by choosing the infamous Sonnet 29 for his ceremony, which tells how a queen of yesteryear lost her crown, her jewels and all her lands, but in her exile, she consoled herself with the love of a particular sandstorm: the one they call Szerencse, whose elegance in rising from the ground is often compared to the flight of a lark. As the planet had often been fractured by inner disputes and brought together by the resilient masses keeping tyranny at bay, poetry was a currency which bore more popular trust than high birth or monetary cunning. There are even more precious currencies, I was to learn, as we started our journey in search of a place that yet bore no name. It was not my first mission as a close observer, nor my first time on a rust-colored planet, though I had never been this far away from the inner rings of the galaxy. I had visited the advanced coastal cities of the east, far removed from the desert we now traversed. It was another life, before I met you. When I was still obsessed with discovering my true name, before I knew that the only true names are the ones you give yourself. To determine the place where the king should lay the foundation stone of the new capital, the nation needs the help of the stars. The stars are the second most valued thing for the Tibirians, after sand. So a party of three of us set off into the dunes: the king, his astronomer and me. “How long will it take?” I asked the king. A shrug of his broad shoulders. “I am more of a novice than you are, dear observer.” He looked like a child on a school excursion, surrounded by beloved friends. The duration of the trip was not determined beforehand. The ideal place for a new capital could assail us any of the nights we spent on the way to it, like an ill-mannered guest arriving days before the rendezvous. We were a curious-looking bunch: me, who almost had the gift of invisibility, the big, handsome king with his black curls, and the astronomer, stranger looking than the both. You see, you have to know this: in Tibiria the task of an astronomer is so important that their choice is subject to many esoteric rules that govern their destiny from almost before they are conceived. In the first place, the astronomer must be born on the same night as the monarch they are to serve. The other unavoidable condition (more important than a mystical predisposition to read the firmament) is related to the baby's appearance: only those born with certain physical characteristics, what our superiors in the central rings call “defects” or “deformities” and which in the language of Tibiria (a sing-songy derivation of the common language) could be translated as “shiny stones in a riverbed”, can be appointed royal astronomers. Erit, our astronomer, had been born with three signs that made him unique: he lacked the classic hair pigmentation of the place, that black that almost seemed artificial, was born with a reddish mark like a rash that occupied more than half of his face, causing his lower lip to uncurl in a constant grimace of disapproval, and one of his arms was visibly shorter than the other, with two fingers missing. All these characteristics present at the moment of birth, the baby Erit and his three mothers were immediately transferred to the palace, where they would live near the new prince as part of the royal servants until both prince and astronomer took their official positions. After they reached the age where they chose their genders, they would sleep in connecting rooms and travel everywhere together until one of them died. Even more than the strange sight that our group offered, I found the small number of this royal retinue curious. “Aren’t you afraid to come without guards?” I asked. The king looked at me in astonishment, and at first I worried I had offended him with the use of the word “afraid,” before remembering, in his tongue, the word was imbued with a particular sense of wisdom, closer to our “cautious” than our “frightened.” “My father had his throat slit in his own throne, dozens of guards surrounding him,” the monarch said then. Neither his tone nor the words betrayed any sadness or vindictiveness at the death. He was just telling a tale, as if it had happened to someone else. “Plus I have Erit with me to protect me in case anything happens.” He flashed a smile like gems you couldn’t be quite sure were authentic, perhaps gaudy baubles, but that shone beautiful nonetheless. I could hear the astronomer stopping the words on his tongue before he clicked it. “Please, Your Highness, do not mislead our observer.” “You have grown so cold of late,” the king complained, pouting fantastically. I sensed that there was something more to his decision to come without an entourage, something older and deeper than the king's simple conviction that a treacherous death will come no matter how many people the king puts in front of him to prevent it. He confirmed it to me a second later. “The journey to found a new capital must be undertaken by the king alone with their astronomer. It’s a secret between two who are so familiar with each other they might as well be one person.” “What about me?” “Observers don't count. They are like dry air around us. Or your horse.” Yet I felt that my visit was an unusual intrusion, and made the ritual even more intimate. Without eyes watching them, the king and his astronomer could pretend that everything between them was tradition and ritual. It was my presence that tore that fiction apart. The astronomer was not only in charge of picking the spot for the new city, but naming it as well. Astronomers held a great power in this society. This particular astronomer, unassuming as his figure was, seemed even more powerful thanks to the peculiar favor the king seemed to treat him with. They say that astronomers who outlive their monarchs end up, without any official exhortation, wandering among ancient capitals, like specters without a purpose. Erit himself nearly shared this sad fate (I learned a little later, among mutual confidences), when at the age of fifteen the king was poisoned by one of his valets. For four days and four nights, the young prince had agonized in his bed, suffering from the most terrible pains, and the royal doctors considered the case lost and acted only out of desperate duty. Erit had to accompany him during all this time, as was the tradition, drinking only water and resting on a fine cot placed at the foot of the royal bed. On the fifth day, the prince began a slow and miraculous recovery, but I suppose (after everything I observed in those days in the desert) that Erit's heart retained a glimpse of what life would be like without Merengeni, rather than without the prince. We dined on cakes filled with parazamm, a fruit that grows here similar to our aizoaceae. The king stretched his muscles with a happy sigh as he put the food in his mouth. “This taste reminds me of childhood,” he said. “Remember, Erit, when we were kids, we used to sneak into the palace kitchen to steal frosted parazamm?” The astronomer made no comment, continuing to chew his dinner with an elegance that would make one think he was the king and Merengeni his servant. “Do you see what I have to face?” the king complained to me. “Pure coldness.” I dared not retort, partly because I knew this was more of his theatrics, but despite his silence, it was clear that the astronomer had sketched the briefest of lopsided smiles when his monarch had brought back memories of those shared childhood days. Through those weeks of journey, I could see why the inhabitants of Tibiria are so obsessed with putting words to the movements of the sand. The desert moves in subtle ways, and can make you lose your way or your sanity if you don't learn to distinguish its moods. “I don't reign over the desert, the desert reigns over me,” the monarch explained in a moment of frustration when a sand shower made it impossible for us to continue advancing that day. At night, my companions, lying in their goatskins and only a few feet from my back, spoke to each other in a dialect unknown to me, their rhythms similar to the main language of the land, but their words unfamiliar. They seemed to argue in shadowy whispers. The king sounded pleading, his astronomer stern. I could recognize some word the king used, common to all the Glass World planets, certain monikers used with owlets and other young birds, and the astronomer every so often called his majesty (almost soundlessly, only the sand and my presence recorded the movement of his lips over the letters of the affectionate nickname) “Geni”. I stayed turned over in my sleeping bag so as not to disturb them, the midnight starlight so sharp that I could clearly see their silhouettes lying side by side, hands close together on the backpack which served them as a pillow. I closed my eyes and managed to fall asleep when the breath of the sand became entangled with the traces of words, of the slow noise of clothes brushing against skin and of skin rubbing against warmth. The next morning (barely a week since we left the current capital) the king announced that this piece of desert, exactly the spot where we were now sitting, eating breakfast, would be the central avenue to his new city. “Is this the place?” I asked, astonished that it was so easy, that the mystical currents were so much like a cheerful man’s whimsy. “Yes.” “How do you know? Because of the stars?” He shook his head with a faint smile. The kind I hadn’t seen before on his face. He seemed to be in a reverie, gaze unfocused, remembering more than talking to me. “No,” he replied. “I just know it has to be. Because this is the place where Erit has given me something that was already mine, from long ago, and any city that blossoms from this memory will bring happiness to its inhabitants, even when it stops being the capital of the kingdom.” “So… wasn't it necessary to look at the stars?” “Actually, it was absolutely necessary, don't you agree?” He laughed with a childish, squeaky laugh, all lungs. He did a wide gesture with his arm, an exaggerated flourish, very ridiculously kingly. “And I shall call my new capital Pacsirta.” “Sentimental, always sentimental,” the astronomer mumbled as he curved his fractured mouth skillfully around his whistle and used it to call the royal messenger: a ruddy-feathered bird that seemed to regard such a historic event with a skepticism that left no doubt why the astronomer favored this creature over his other animals. Erit turned to me. “The legend says that messenger birds do not serve us, but we serve them, that they eat neither animal nor seed and only feed on messages, and the moment we stop talking to them they die.” An animal that feeds on words. I doubted it was unique to these planets, so far from the center of the known world. I wonder if it was a cousin of mine, for I too survived on the scraps of tales and myths I’ve been collecting on these travels. The king winked at me. “If you use them to carry love letters, they get fat and splendid, very beautiful. I used to use a golden one that went from one side of the palace to the other, boy, did I feed her, going back and forth from my quarters to those of—” “Your Majesty,” interrupted his astronomer, curt but almost gentle. “Yes, yes, the rites, the rites. Come on, let's get to work.” The rites were, perhaps, the closest thing to what I expected on this trip. They asked me to keep a respectful distance, for dances and recitals cannot be offered to strangers in sufficient detail for anyone to copy them or record them accurately. I suppose that at one time this planet also suffered the plague of anthropology and have taken measures to remedy its effects. The king and his astronomer had brought special food and liquor for the occasion that I, too, was to drink. They’d also brought a humble-looking stone, barely bigger than my hand, which was said to have been part of the cobblestone of the first capital of the kingdom, nineteen generations ago. We placed it between the three of us, in the exact spot where we had let the embers of our bonfire go out the night before. It felt like we were asking permission. I stayed a few more weeks while the royal retinue arrived to settle in their future capital, and the king performed the occult rites that would secure the blessing of the place. Those were pleasant days full of music. I also had the opportunity to observe that, despite the relaxed face he offers to the world, the monarch harbored many political concerns about the future of his people. “I know that my kingdom must open up to others,” he told me on one of the few occasions when we were alone. His tone was so serious I had to stare at him closely to verify that this man in front of me was indeed King Merengeni, famous for not practicing seriousness. “And I know that the planet you come from would love to sink its teeth into us.” I did not contradict him. I was not in the habit of lying for work, only for pleasure. And at this point it was doubtful to which planet I owed allegiance, of all planets. If any of them. “Do you think it would be better to join the Assembly of the Sands?” The Glass Worlds were being shaken by political upheaval, which some called crisis and some called the seasons of hope. Many planets chose to unify under one flag and against the central rings. Against my employer. “It's not ideal. There are some things I don't agree with. Perhaps it is naive to think that such a small kingdom can change them from within.” This made me smile. “Naive. Well, I bet it's not the first time you've been called that, your majesty.” The gleam of newborn gemstones returned to his eyes and his tone changed, as if seriousness had never inhabited him in the first place. “Ah, my astronomer thinks he is very mysterious, very hermetic. He is the easiest to read among all of us.” I agreed. Of course it was not an easy task to decipher the monarch of the wandering capitals, however charming he might be. I was tempted to advise him to stay as he had always been, not to let the Plastic Worlds approach Tibiria, and to avoid signing pacts with the Assembly of the Sands either, admirable as it was to me. I did not want to hear, a year or two from now, news of a small kingdom in the heart of the desert and its smiling ruler, subsumed and perhaps shattered in a just and necessary war. It was a selfish (and, I knew, counter-revolutionary) wish, but I would like this place, this planet, to remain forever suspended in a night under the stars and among the dunes, where two childhood friends called each other by their real names. I myself felt the desire to stay there, stay and bask in the whirl of three months of popular festivities that followed the pronouncement of a new capital. When I left for the next planet in my journey, the infamous Galeano and its manifold revolutions, King Merengeni gave me a copy of the sonnets collecting all the names of the sand in Tibiria, number 29 marked with a dry parazamm leaf. I kept it in my backpack, together with the little contraband I had left and the notebook where I drew cartographies immune to being contained in my official messages to you. The parazamm leaf smelled both fresh and like something that took many years to sprout. |
|
Lara Alonso Corona
Lara Alonso Corona (they/them) is a queer writer from the north of Spain. They studied Film and TV before moving to London. Their fiction has appeared in venues like Literary Orphans, Solarpunk Magazine, Betty Fedora and the Pilot Press anthology on queer sickness, among others. They are the current reviews editor at the literary magazine Minor Literature(s). They now live in Madrid.
|
|
Baubles From Bones © 2024
|