On
Xiaoping’s eleventh birthday, his mothers decided to take him to meet the
Qlorq.
This was quite a treat, because most kids didn’t get to see the Qlorq at all,
let alone meet it, and certainly not
at only eleven. But then Xiaoping had influential mothers.
They gathered round him in their bright
blue gowns, their hands fluttering, just like a flock of twittering birds.
Their eyes glittered like wet pebbles, as they told him just how lucky he was
that they were so influential.
“And now,” First Mother said, frowning
importantly so that Xiaoping would know she was saying something important,
“we’ll take the rocket to Imperial City, and there we’ll go to meet the Qlorq.”
“You’ve got to be on your best behaviour,”
Second Mother added. “It’s a tremendous privilege to meet the Qlorq. Hardly
anyone outside the royal family gets the chance – at your age. You’ve got to
make the best of the chance you can.”
Third Mother had been waiting impatiently
for her turn to speak, so impatiently that she began talking even before Second
Mother had quite finished and in
consequence was glared at by her. “I hope you understand,” she said, “that it
wasn’t easy for us to arrange this meeting for you. In fact, it was very, very
hard. We couldn’t have done it without a lot of effort – even with all our
influence. You ought to be grateful to us.”
They all looked at Fourth Mother, but she
said nothing, just lowered her eyes. She was the youngest and least beautiful
of the four, and hardly ever spoke anyway. The three other Mothers waited just
long enough to be polite, and then turned back to Xiaoping.
“Come on,” they said, almost
simultaneously, so their voices overlapped, like the chirping of birds. “The rocket
will soon be here.”
Xiaoping had only travelled in a rocket
once before, and that was a long enough ago that he hardly remembered it, so
that he looked around with keen interest when they arrived at the port. The
rocket was green and gold, with a prow in the shape of a dragon’s head and
stabilising fins like serrated wings. It was called “Wind Spirit.” A good name,
everyone said, a blessed name; the Emperor had chosen it himself.
Actually, the Emperor hadn’t chosen anything himself, because he was a four-year-old boy who could barely write his own name, not that it made any iota of difference. In any case, Xiaoping and his four mothers got on and sat down in their places, which were all near windows except for Xiaoping’s and Fourth Mother’s seats. Then a tall, mannish woman attendant passed round cubes of opium flavoured candy which all the three elder Mothers ate, though they wouldn’t let Xiaoping have any, and Fourth Mother refused with a shake of her head. After a while, the rocket took off and flew quickly over the mountains and seas, which Xiaoping couldn’t see since he wasn’t sitting at a window. Soon enough, anyway, they came down to the port at Imperial City, where the mothers had hired rooms so they could freshen up and rest before they went to meet the Qlorq.
The mothers had, of course, not seen the
rooms before they’d hired them, so they immediately started to look for someone
to complain to, all but Fourth Mother who took Xiaoping aside and dressed him
in his new red and black robe. The robe
was too large, of course, because his mothers believed in buying clothes he
could grow into, and the hat was so large that it kept trying to fall over his
eyes. Finally Fourth Mother solved the problem by pinning it to his pigtail.
The Qlorq had a palace to itself, which was
a personal gift from the Imperial Regent and was known as the Hall of Blessed
Melancholy. What the Qlorq thought about the title only it knew – nobody had
ever asked it, or, if anyone had, it hadn’t deigned to answer. Still, for all
its gloomy name, the Hall was a rather grand palace, painted Imperial Yellow
except for its green doors, windows, and curving roof. When Xiaoping and his
mothers – the first three still squabbling, in turn, over whose fault it was
that the rented rooms were so unsatisfactory – finally reached it, they were
late. The guards at the gate crashed their halberds on the ground and refused
to let them in. Xiaoping was still wondering what the point of arming guards
with halberds was, when First Mother reached inside her robes and passed
something to the guards, and they let them through at once.
“Opium,” First Mother explained succinctly,
as they climbed up a set of broad stairs. “I’d brought a pouch full along. It’s
worth much more than money, in Imperial City.” Xiaoping thought this as strange
as the halberds the guards were carrying, but he didn’t say anything. His
mothers didn’t approve of him asking questions. It wasn’t polite, they said,
that a boy should question his elders.
The Qlorq lived in a single room deep
inside the palace, a room reached by corridors filled with fluttering eunuchs,
several of whom competed to open doors and guide Xiaoping and his mothers. Each
one of them had to be given some opium as a reward, and First Mother’s face had
settled in deep lines of bitter disgust. Xiaoping watched the lines covertly
and with growing dismay, because he knew that later he’d be made to pay for
them.
“See how I had to give away all the opium
just so you could have your birthday treat,” she would begin. “And do I see the
slightest flicker of gratitude on your face, you ungrateful boy?” And it would
go on from there, Second Mother and Third Mother joining in turn by turn so
that First Mother wouldn’t then blame them for leaving her to discipline
Xiaoping alone. Only Fourth Mother wouldn’t say a word, but then they wouldn’t
care about her, because she never said anything anyway.
Fortunately, just as Xiaoping had decided
that if the lines on First Mother’s face grew any deeper he’d suggest they
forget it and go home, they reached the last door, behind which was the room
occupied by the Qlorq itself, the room it never left. There was no guard at
this door, just an officious little man in the green robes of the Imperial
household service.
“Yes, very good,” he said after asking for
and checking their permit. “The boy alone will go in, of course.”
“No!” First Mother said sharply. “We will
all go in.”
“No knowing what kind of trash the Qlorq
will fill his head with otherwise,” Second Mother said.
“You can’t trust the boy,” Third Mother
added, glaring at him. “He’s always dreaming, and no telling what he might do
in there.”
Fourth Mother said nothing.
“If it’s a question of something extra...” First Mother began, her hand
reaching into her opium bag.
“I’m sorry, great ladies.” The official
shook his head, with obvious regret. “It’s not something I have discretion
over. The Qlorq itself does not see...subjects...unless
they’re alone.”
“Alone?” First Mother repeated.
“Why does the Qlorq want that?” Second
Mother queried.
“What should we do then?” Third Mother
asked.
There was a brief silence. The mothers
looked at each other, and First Mother opened her mouth to speak.
“Go,” Fourth Mother said, hurriedly. Since
it was her turn to speak, if she chose, First Mother could do nothing but glare
in baffled fury. “Go,” Fourth Mother repeated, and pushed him gently towards
the door. “We’ll wait out here.”
“Wait –“ First Mother began, but she was
too late. The official had already ushered Xiaoping to the door, and was in the
act of opening it with the other hand. A moment later, Xiaoping was inside.
The Qlorq’s room was sheathed in silvery
metal, which covered the floor, ceiling and all the walls, and was chill,
almost freezing. Inside, mists shifted and curled, silvery too, so that it was
difficult to see anything, and one might almost think the room was empty. But a
few moments later the fog parted, and Xiaoping gasped involuntarily.
The Qlorq sat on a low platform, one of its
foreclaws grasping a stalk of sugarcane, the other end of which was clamped in
its round mouth. Its heavy head swung towards Xiaoping, as though it could see
him, though it had, of course, no eyes or visible ears.
Xiaoping stood perfectly still, his heart
hammering, his breath caught in his throat. The Qlorq shifted its huge bulk
round until it was turned fully towards him, and raised its other foreclaw in
greeting. For a minute or two, which seemed to stretch out forever, nothing
happened. There was no noise but for the faint crunch of the Qlorq chewing at
the sugarcane.
Then Xiaoping felt something in his mind,
like a feather brushing along the surface of his brain. Though he’d expected
it, had been told it would happen, his first impulse was of freezing terror. He
felt as if his limbs were congealing, and his mouth went dry. If he could have
moved he might have tried to run away.
Then, suddenly, the crawling silver mists
of the room vanished, and he was standing on a high rocky ledge, with clouds
floating around him. At his feet the ground fell away in a vertical precipice,
down to a great plain which went on and on as far as the eye could see. It was
so sudden that he gasped and staggered involuntarily.
Then it was as though a hand steadied him,
and turned him so he looked to one side. There, winding through the land like a
great dark ribbon, was a river. His eyes followed its course, till far away, at
the limits of the horizon, he saw it vanish into a dark smudge that stretched
till it met the sky – and he knew it was the sea.
“Is that what you want me to look at?” he
asked. “The river?”
For a long moment there was no answer. Then,
abruptly, the river seemed to jump closer, till he could see the water moving,
slowly and sluggishly, full of mud and the branches of trees. In the middle of the
flood he saw something else, something pale that bobbed in the water. At first
he thought it was another piece of jetsam, and then he saw an arm raised in the
air, waving as if for help.
“He’s going to drown –“ he began to say,
then broke off, because a piece of wood came down the flood, at first sight no better
than a mere wooden plank. But the searching arm found it, and pulled the
exhausted body out of the water; and the plank stayed firm. And even as
Xiaoping gasped, as in shared relief, he saw that it was a boy, about his own age.
“Is he going to try and make for the shore,”
Xiaoping asked, “or will he make for the sea?” For a very long time there was
no answer, and all he saw was the body lying on the piece of wood. The river
bank was close by, and within easy reach, but instead of making for it, the boy
on the raft, seemed content to let it sweep him down towards the sea.
Then he saw, on either side of the river,
buildings rising, until a mighty city towered over the boy and his wooden
shelter, a city of towers and walls that seemed to touch the sky, and streets
so broad that nobody had seen the like. There were steps leading down to the
river, and at one such the wooden plank drifted, and there the boy stumbled off
the river and onto the shore. Before walking up, though, he looked around,
hesitated a moment, and then went back down and pulled the makeshift raft on
shore. For an instant he looked round at Xiaoping – and the face he had,
Xiaoping saw without surprise, was his own.
Moments later the cliff, the plain and
river, all disappeared, and a new scene took its place. At first Xiaoping thought
it was the room back again, but then he saw that it was smoke which clouded the
air, not mist, and that the ground underneath was not the silvery metal of the
room, but rather a layer of grey-black ash. And behind the veil of smoke there
was red flickering light, as from a great and distant fire, and he seemed to hear
a faint noise, like the rustling of leaves, or a million stifled screams. It
was as though a city burned on the horizon, and the ash fell from the sky like
rain.
He stood on the plain, and beside him stood
a figure, silhouetted against the red glow of that far fire. By his side he
held a plank of wood, and though he couldn’t see the face, Xiaoping knew who it
was. The figure’s shoulders drooped, the attitude full of sorrow, yet defiant
at the same time. And there were footsteps approaching, through the smoke, as
of many marching men; footsteps coming closer and closer.
Then he was standing atop a high dais, looking
down at a cheering throng. And they were looking up at him, and cheering – not at someone with his face, but him,
Xiaoping, cheering and waving fluttering banners. And though he waved back and
smiled, he felt his heart burdened with worry, because he knew the hard part
was still to come.
Then he was standing in the room full of
silver mists, and the Qlorq, still chewing on its cane, was staring blandly at
him with its eyeless face. He knew he wouldn’t get any more, that he’d been
told as much as he needed to know. But he had the right to ask one question.
He asked it.
******************************
Years
later, when Xiaoping had led the rebellion that had overthrown the Imperial
Dynasty, and wrested the Empire from the corrupt band of eunuchs and officials
who had drained it and brought it to the verge of ruin, he would look back at
that moment.
“I still don’t really know,” he told Fourth
Mother, who, though very old now, was still his chief confidant, “what might
have happened if I’d chosen to drift on down to the sea, or steered my way to
the shore before I reached the city. The Qlorq knew, of course, where it would
all lead – it knew that it was showing me a path full of pain and sorrow – but that
it was the only way for me. Yet that wasn’t the most important thing that I
learned in that room on that day.”
He paused. Fourth Mother raised her
ancient, wrinkled face from her reading and looked at him, waiting for him to
continue.
“It was what the Qlorq replied when I asked
it what it wanted. Nobody else had
ever asked that question. I don’t know why I asked it – more out of pique than
anything, perhaps, since I was angry with it for showing me a future I didn’t
want. But then it showed me...”
He paused again, because his throat was
dry. “It showed me,” he said when he could go on, “a world of such beauty, such
aching loveliness, that I have no words to describe it. Imagine blue skies over
blue water, and ice cliffs towering in the distance, while more ice rises in
the foreground, in turrets and arches and flying buttresses. It was an ice
city, lovelier by far than anything we can ever create, or even imagine.
“And the Qlorq yearned for this place. It
yearned for it with the desperate ache of someone who is exiled from a home he
can never hope to see again, with the terrible agony of not even being able to
shed a tear to lessen his sorrow. The Qlorq wanted to go home.”
He thought a moment, rubbing his face,
trying to find the words to express what he wanted to say. “And that’s why I
did, actually, steer to shore at the city, with you, revered Mother. That was
why I rebelled, and why we fought those battles, and destroyed so much and
harmed so many. That is why I overthrew the Emperor. Not because I wanted to do
any of those things – but because I wanted to be in power, so I could release
the Qlorq and let it go home.”
He closed his eyes, and he saw again the
Qlorq fitting its stubby body into the grey shell of its craft, about to set
out on its long, long journey between the stars. “Who knows what it will find?”
he asked. “Who knows whether its home has changed beyond imagining? Maybe it was better where it was. Maybe I
shouldn’t have sent it away.”
“You
did the right thing,” Fourth Mother said. “It gave you a vision. You gave it
its life back. Anything else would have been unworthy.”
But Xiaoping still wondered, and worried;
but as the years passed, he drew comfort from one thing.
Just before it had drawn the lid of its
capsule shut, the Qlorq had raised one stubby forelimb, and though he told
himself it could have been anything, any gesture at all, Xiaoping knew that, at
that last moment, it had waved to him.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2013