The Carpet Makers (4 page)

But all that, he thought as he shambled, panting, along the stone path, all that wouldn’t be reason enough to get old if I had a choice. He had made it his habit to get a head start on the calendar and collect the school fees somewhat earlier than usual, so that he could make his rounds during the cold season. Especially the visits to the carpet makers, who all lived far outside the city and to whom—as befitted their status—one had to go in person with any request … those were always strenuous days. He no longer wanted to attempt these treks in the glare of the sun at the end of the year.

Finally he reached the terrace in front of the house. He allowed himself several minutes to catch his breath while studying Ostvan’s home. It was quite old, as were most of the homes of the hair-carpet makers. The teacher’s sharp eye recognized a joining technique in the stone wall that had been commonly used in the last century. Some building additions were recognizably more recent, even though they appeared equally old.

Who was still interested in such things nowadays? he thought unhappily. That was the sort of knowledge that would disappear with him. He knocked on the door and glanced down quickly to be sure that his teacher’s robe was properly draped. It was important to present a correct appearance, especially here.

An old woman opened the door for him. He recognized her. It was Ostvan’s mother.

“My greetings to you, Garliad,” he said. “I have come about the school tuition for your granddaughter Taroa.”

“Parnag,” she replied simply. “Come in.”

He propped his staff against the wall outside and entered, gathering his robe about him. She offered him a seat and a cup of water; then she retreated to the rear of the house to inform her son. Through the open door, Parnag could hear the way she shuffled up the stairs to the carpet-knotting room.

He took a swallow. It felt good to sit down. He scrutinized the room he knew from earlier visits—the bare white walls, the rusty sword on a hook on the wall, the row of wine bottles on a high shelf. Through a crack in the door, he caught a glimpse of one of the carpet maker’s other womenfolk, who was engaged in folding laundry in the next room. Then he heard steps again; this time they were young, resilient steps.

A young man with a narrow, hard-bitten face walked through the door. Ostvan the Younger. He was known to be very abrupt and offensive in his dealings with people and, in person, he gave the impression he was constantly trying to prove something. Parnag found Ostvan disagreeable, but he knew that Ostvan held him in high regard. Maybe he senses that he has me to thank for his life, Parnag thought bitterly.

They greeted one another formally, and Parnag reported the progress the carpet maker’s daughter Taroa had made in the past year. Ostvan nodded at everything without seeming overly interested.

“Surely you’re training her in obedience and in love for the Emperor, aren’t you?” he wanted to know.

“Of course,” said Parnag.

“Good.” Ostvan nodded and pulled out a few coins to pay for the school fees.

Parnag departed, lost deep in thought. Every visit here stirred up something inside him: memories of times long past when he was young and full of energy and had believed he could concern himself with the whole universe—of times when he had felt strong enough to force the world to give up its secrets and its truths.

Parnag snorted in irritation. All long past that was. Today he was nothing more than a peculiar old man who suffered from too great a capacity for remembering. And besides, the sun already hung hazy red just above the horizon, and its rays were not strong enough to give any warmth. He had better hurry if he wanted to be home before nightfall.

A shadow that was moving along caught Parnag’s attention. When he followed it with his eyes, he perceived the silhouette of a rider on the horizon. Bent over as though asleep, a large figure sat on a poor little mount that was plodding laboriously onward.

Parnag couldn’t have said why, but this image elicited a sense of approaching doom in him. He stopped and squinted, but could see no better than before. A sleeping rider at dusk—that was surely nothing unusual.

*   *   *

When he arrived home, he discovered to his dismay that he had forgotten to close the window to his schoolroom. The tireless north wind had had the entire day to blow fine sandy dust in from the desert and distribute it in every corner of the room. Aggravated, Parnag fetched his ragged straw broom from the cabinet where he also kept his small hoard of teaching supplies. He even had to sweep some sand out of the window frame in order to close it. He lit the earthen oil lamp and went to work in its warm, flickering light, dusting off the table and chairs, cleaning the shelves against the wall and the tattered books on them, and finally sweeping up the sand on the floor.

Afterward, he sat down exhausted on one of the chairs and stared into space. The unsteady light and this room at night—these things also stirred up memories, which had been awakened by the visit to Ostvan. It was here that they had often sat, had read to one another out of books. Filled with passionate intensity, they had discussed those words, sentence by sentence, until—more than once—night had turned into morning. But without warning, he had suddenly dissolved the little group. And since then, he had always avoided being in this room at night.

He still had the books. They were lying in a dark corner of the attic, bound up in a worn-out old sack and hidden beneath firewood. He was absolutely determined never in his lifetime to bring them out again; he would leave it up to his successor to find them … or never to find them at all.

Misfortune will befall whoever begins to doubt the Emperor.

Odd. He remembered suddenly that—even as a child—this doctrine had troubled him more than any other. Doubt was probably a sickness he was born with, and fighting against it was his lot in life … and learning to trust. Trust! He was very far from being trusting. In truth, he thought bitterly, I am satisfied just to stay away from the whole subject.

Misfortune will befall whoever begins to doubt the Emperor. And he will bring misfortune on all who associate with him.

Back then, purchasing these books had been a victory. He was able to convince a friend making a trip to the Port City to buy them for him, and the following year, he took possession of them with an unmatched feeling of triumph. He had paid an unbelievable sum of money for them, but it had been worth it to him. He would have given his right arm to own these books—books that came from other planets in the Empire.

But, without him realizing it, this act had planted the seeds of his doubt in fruitful ground.

To his boundless astonishment, he found references to makers of hair carpets in these books from three different worlds. Sometimes he came across words and expressions whose meanings were unclear to him, but the descriptions of this highest of all castes identified them clearly enough: they were men who spend their entire lives tying a single carpet for the Emperor’s Palace out of the hair of their wives and daughters.

He still remembered the moment he stopped reading, looked up with furrowed brow, and stared at the sooty flame of the oil lamp while questions began to form in his mind that would never leave him from that moment on.

He began to make calculations. Most of his pupils never achieved any significant proficiency in dealing with large numbers, but arithmetic was one of his greatest strengths; even so, he soon found himself having difficulty. About three hundred carpet makers lived in the region of Yahannochia. And how many other such cities could there be? He wasn’t sure, but even with cautious estimates, he came up with a breathtaking quantity of hair carpets, which the traders brought annually to the Port City for transfer to the spacecraft of the Imperial Shipsmen. And a hair carpet wasn’t exactly small—about as long as a man was tall and as broad as his reach: that was considered to be the ideal size.

What were the words in the covenant oath of the carpet makers?
Every province of the Empire does its part to beautify the Palace of the Emperor, and it is our honor to tie the most precious carpets in the universe.
How big was this palace if the production of an entire planet wasn’t sufficient to lay it with carpets?

He had had the sensation that he was dreaming. He could have done these calculations at any time in the past, but the idea wouldn’t have occurred to him; before that moment, such number games would have seemed pure blasphemy to him. But now he owned these books telling him about makers of hair carpets on three other planets.… And who knew how many others there might be?

Now after so much time had passed, it wasn’t easy for him to reconstruct the reasons for what he did then: he organized a little circle that met regularly in the evening, several men about his age who thought that continuing their learning was a worthy goal. Among them were the healer, several craftsmen, and one of the wealthy herdsmen.

It was a time-consuming and tiring business. He was trying to do nothing less than train them to become the conversation partners he was seeking. There was so much they had to learn before it made any sense to discuss the questions that were on his mind. Like most people, they had only the haziest concepts about the nature of the world they lived in. The Emperor lived “in a palace in the stars”—they knew that much—but they had no idea what that meant. So, he began by teaching them what he knew about stars and planets. That stars in the night sky are simply distant suns, many of them with their own planets, on which other people lived. That, of course, all these planets belonged to the Empire, and that, on one planet immeasurably far away in the heart of the Empire, stood the Star Palace. He had to teach them how to calculate area and how to deal with large numbers. And only then was he able to begin cautiously acquainting them with his heretical thoughts.

But … misfortune will befall whoever begins to doubt the Emperor. And he will bring misfortune on all who associate with him. Doubt starts at one point and then spreads like a consuming fire.…

*   *   *

His memories pursued him even the following day while he was teaching. As usual, the little room was filled to the last chair and to the last available seat on the floor, and today it took great effort to keep the horde of lively children in check. The class read in unison while Parnag followed the text absentmindedly in his own book and tried to recognize the individual voices of those who were reading poorly or slowly. Usually, he was capable of that, but today he heard the voices of people who weren’t there at all.

“There’s a preacher speaking on Market Square,” one of the older boys, the son of a cloth merchant, called out. “My father told me to go there after class.”

“We can all go together,” Parnag replied. He made it a point to appear especially zealous in religious matters.

That hadn’t always been the case. In his younger years, he had been more open, had shared his thoughts and feelings without hesitation. When he felt low, he asked his pupils’ pardon, and when a problem occupied him, he even made comments about it in class from time to time. Even when those books cast him into deep doubt and confusion, he tried to explain the situation to his pupils.

But he had looked into the uncomprehending eyes of the children and had changed the subject. Only one of his pupils, a curious, unusually intelligent boy named Abron, reacted differently.

To his amazement, Parnag found in this skinny, little boy the conversation partner he had been seeking without success among the adults. Abron knew so little, but what he knew was a foundation for surprisingly independent thoughts. He could look at you with his unfathomable, dark eyes, and with the simple, straightforward intelligence of a child, he could see through flawed conclusions and ask questions that got to the heart of the matter. Parnag was fascinated, and without a second thought, he invited the boy to participate in his evening discussion group.

Abron came, and he sat there with wide eyes, not saying a word. His father, Ostvan the Elder, a carpet maker, subsequently forbade him to attend school at all.

The teacher, however, invited Abron to come to see him whenever and as often as he wanted, to read all his books, and to ask anything that interested him. So Abron became a regular guest in Parnag’s house. Again and again, he found excuses to slip into town to spend hours and then entire afternoons poring over the teacher’s books. Parnag made him tea from the best herbs and answered all the boy’s questions as best he could.

Looking back, Parnag realized with emotion that these had been the happiest hours of his life. He had come to love Abron as though he were his own son, and he tried with almost fatherly tenderness to satisfy the boy’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge.

That was the reason Abron was present when Parnag unexpectedly received a visit from his friend who had returned from a second trip to the Port City, with a package of books—and an unbelievable rumor.

“Are you sure?” Parnag had to assure himself that he had heard correctly.

“I heard it from several of the foreign traders. And I can’t imagine how they could have cooked it up together.”

“A rebellion.”

“Yes. A rebellion against the Emperor.”

“Is that even possible?”

“They say the Emperor had to abdicate.”

After that evening, Abron never returned. Sometime later, after exacting a promise of silence, someone informed Parnag that Abron was no longer alive. He had apparently made heretical, blasphemous statements at home, following which his father had killed him in favor of a newborn son.

At that moment, Parnag recognized the scope of his crime. He had allowed his doubt to destroy a promising young life. He had sown misfortune. Without a word of explanation, he dissolved the discussion group and refused ever afterward to talk about the questions that had been posed there.

*   *   *

Now, as he trotted toward Market Square, surrounded by his pupils, a feeling of depression came over him. It was a cool, sunny day, but he felt as though he were walking through a valley engulfed in the black of night. He sank down into his memories as though they were quicksand. At the edge of his consciousness, he watched himself make several indecisive efforts to keep the band of children together, but he didn’t really care, so he allowed them to do as they wished.