Envoy Extraordinary

"Come here, my man."

The soldier crept out of hiding.

"The All-Father has destroyed General Post humus before the eyes of you and your companions for the sin of open rebellion against the Emperor. Tell them."

He turned to Phanocles.

"Go and save what you can. You are heavily in debt with humanity. Go with them, Mamillius, for you are in charge. There is an occasion waiting for you through the tunnel. Rise to it."

Their steps echoed in the tunnel and died away.

"Come, lady."

He sat down on one of the stone seats by the lily-pool.

"Stand before me."

She came, stood, but the grace of movement was gone.

"Give it me."

For a while she said nothing, but stood defended by her draperies. The Emperor said nothing but allowed the silent authority of his outstretched hand to do its work. Then she shoved the thing at him, left it in his hand and raised her own to' her hidden face. The Emperor looked down at his palm thoughtfully.

"I owe my life to you it seems. Not that Posthumus wouldn't have made a better job of ruling. Lady, I must see your face."

She said nothing, did nothing. The Emperor watched her, then nodded as though they had been in explicit communion.

"I understand."

He got up, walked round the pool and stood looking over the cliff at the now visible waves.

"Let this remain another bit of history that is better forgotten."

He pitched the brass butterfly into the sea.

4. L'ENVOY

The Emperor and Phanocles lay opposite each other on. either side of a low table. The table, the floor, the room, were circular and surrounded by pillars that held up a shadowy cupola. A constellation hung glittering in the opening directly over their heads but the room itself was lit softly from lights placed behind the pillars-warm light, congenial to leisure and digestion. A flute meditated somewhere.

"Will it work, do you think?"

"Why not, Caesar?"

"Strange man. You ponder thus and thus on universal law and evolve a certainty. Of course it will work. I must be patient."

They were silent for a while. The eunuch voice joined and commented on the flute.

"What was Mamillius doing when you left him, Phanocles?"

"He was giving many orders."

"Excellent."

"They were the wrong orders, but men were obeying him."

"That is the secret. He will be a terrible Emperor. Better than Caligula but less talented than Nero."

"He was so proud of the scar in his helmet. He said he had discovered that he was a man of action."

"So much for poetry. Poor Mamillius."

"No Caesar. He said that action brought out the poet in him and that he had created the perfect poem in action."

"Not an epic, surely?"

"An epigram, Caesar. 'Euphrosyne is beautiful but dumb."

The Emperor inclined his head gravely.

"Whereas you and I know that she is extremely clever and quick-witted."

Phanocles lifted a little on his couch.

"How could you know that?"

The Emperor rolled a grape backwards and forwards under his finger.

"I shall marry her, of course. Do not gape at me,. Phanocles, or fear that I shall have you strangled when I see her face. At my age, unfortunately, it will be a marriage in name only. But it will give her security and secrecy and a measure of peace. She has a harelip, has she not?"

The blood suffused Phanocles' face, seemed to drown him and make his eyes bolt. The Emperor wagged a finger.

"Only a young fool like Mamillius could mistake her pathological shyness for a becoming modesty. I whisper this down to you from the pinnacle of a long experience and hope no woman may hear: but we men invented modesty. I wonder if we invented chastity as well? No beautiful woman could possibly refuse to show her face for so long if it were unblemished."

"I did not dare tell you."

"Because you saw that I entertained you for her sake? Alas for Mamillius and romantic love. Perseus and Andromeda! How he will dislike me. I ought to have remembered from the first that an Emperor cannot enjoy a normal human relationship."

"I am sorry."

"So am I, Phanocles, and not wholly for myself. Did you never think to turn the light of your extraordinary intellect on Medicine?"

"No, Caesar."

"Shall I tell you why?"

"I am listening."

The Emperor's words were clear and gentle, dropping in the quiet room like tiny stones.

"I said you are hubristic. You are also selfish. You are alone in your universe with natural law and people are an interruption, an intrusion. I am selfish too and alone-but with the shape of people acknowledged to have a certain right to independent existence. Oh, you natural philosophers! Are there many of you, I wonder? Your single-minded and devoted selfishness, your royal preoccupation with the only thing that can interest you, could go near to wiping life off the earth as I wipe the bloom from this grape."

His nostrils quivered.

"But silence now. Here comes the trout."

However, there was a ritual of this too, entry of the majordomo and the service, more patterns of movement. The Emperor broke his own commandment.