Interesting Times

would do to him when it turned out that he couldn’t. Not a lot, he thought, if I’m already running. Of course they could curse his memory and call him names, but he was used to that. Sticks and stones may break my bones, he thought. He was vaguely aware that there was a second half to the saying, but he’d never bothered because the first half always occupied all his attention.
    Even the Luggage had left him. That was a minor bright spot, but he missed that patter of little feet…
    “Before we start,” he said, “I think you ought to sing a revolutionary song.”
    The cadre liked the idea. Under cover of their chanting he sidled over to Butterfly, who gave him a knowing smile.
    “You know I can’t do it!”
    “The Master said you were very resourceful.”
    “I can’t magic a hole in a wall!”
    “I’m sure you’ll think of something. And…Great Wizard?”
    “Yes, what?”
    “Favorite Pearl, the child with the toy rabbit…”
    “Yes?”
    “The cadre is all she has. The same goes for many of the others. When the warlords fight, lots of people die. Parents. Do you understand? I was one of the first to read What I Did On My Holidays , Great Wizard, and what I saw in there was a foolish man who for some reason is always lucky. Great Wizard…I hope for everyone’s sake you have a great deal of luck. Especially for yours.”

    Fountains tinkled in the courts of the Sun Emperor. Peacocks made their call, which sounds like a sound made by something that shouldn’t look as beautiful as that. Ornamental trees cast their shade as only they knew how—ornamentally.
    The gardens occupied the heart of the city and it was possible to hear the noises from outside, although these were muted because of the straw spread daily on the nearest streets and also because any sound considered too loud would earn its originator a very brief stay in prison.
    Of the gardens, the most aesthetically pleasing was the one laid out by the first Emperor, One Sun Mirror. It consisted entirely of gravel and stones, but artfully raked and laid out as it might be by a mountain torrent with a refined artistic sense. It was here that One Sun Mirror, in whose reign the Empire had been unified and the Great Wall built, came to refresh his soul and dwell upon the essential unity of all things, while drinking wine out of the skull of some enemy or possibly a gardener who had been too clumsy with his rake.
    At the moment the garden was occupied by Two Little Wang, the Master of Protocol, who came there because he felt it was good for his nerves.
    Perhaps it was the number two, he’d always told himself. It was an unlucky birth number. Being called Little Wang was merely a lack-of-courtesy detail, a sort of minor seagull dropping after the great heap of buffalo excrement that Heaven had pasted into his very horoscope. Although he had to admit that he hadn’t made things any better by allowing himself to become Master of Protocol.
    It had seemed such a good idea at the time. He’d risen gently through the Agatean civil service by mastering those arts essential to the practice of good government and administration (such as calligraphy, origami, flower arranging, and the Five Wonderful Forms of poetry). He’d dutifully got on with the tasks assigned to him and noticed only vaguely that there didn’t seem to be quite as many high-ranking members of the civil service as there used to be, and then one day a lot of senior mandarins—most of them a lot more senior than he was, it occurred to him later—had rushed up to him while he was trying to find a rhyme for “orange blossom” and congratulated him on being the new Master.
    That had been three months ago.
    And of the things that had occurred to him in those intervening three months the most shameful was this: he had come to believe that the Sun Emperor was not, in fact, the Lord of Heaven, the Pillar of the Sky and the Great River of Blessings, but an evil-minded madman whose death had been too long delayed.
    It was an awful thought. It was like hating motherhood and raw fish, or objecting to sunlight. Most people develop their social conscience when young, during that brief period between leaving school and deciding that injustice isn’t necessarily all bad, and it was something of a shock to suddenly find one at the age of sixty.
    It wasn’t that he was against the Golden Rules. It made sense that a man prone to thieving should have his hands cut off. It prevented him from