Our only comfort is that there doesn’t seem to be the slightest movement on the other side of the Wall, except for a few scouts who flash past on horseback now and then, and sometimes we also see small groups of ragged Turkish soldiers. When, toward the end of summer, the Turks first appeared, our lookouts were terribly alarmed. Our first thought was that they might be attack units disguised as defeated Turks, but then we got reports from spies who had infiltrated them that they were in fact the remnants of the Ottoman army Timur had routed at Chubukabad. They’ve been wandering up and down the frontier for a long time now. Most of them are old men, and, when evening comes, their thoughts go back to those distant lands with fearsome names where they fought, and also presumably to their Sultan Bayazed, whose memory trails with them across the steppe like a dead flash of lightning.
More than once they asked for work on the Wall restoration project; after the repeated collapses of the right-hand tower, one was so persistent he actually got to see me personally and told me in bad Chinese that he’d once seen in a far distant land a bridge in one of whose pillars a man had been immured. He pointed to his eyes as he swore that he had really seen it, and even asked for a scrap of cardboard so he could draw the shape of the bridge for me. It was only a small bridge, he said, but to stop it from collapsing a sacrifice had to be made. How, then, could this huge Wall of China remain standing without an offering of the same kind?
He came back to see me a few days later and told the same story once more, but this time he made a lavishly detailed drawing of the bridge.
When I asked him why he’d pictured it upside down, he turned pale. “I don’t know,” he replied, “perhaps because that’s the way it looks in the water. . Anyway, the night before last, that’s how I saw it in my dream. Upside down.” After he left, we took some time to look at his bizarre sketch. He explained that the symbol † marked the place of the sacrifice. After I stared at it hard for a long while, I thought I could see the bridge beginning to quiver. Or was that because the Turk had told me that he remembered the bridge’s reflection in the river better than the bridge itself? If I may say so, it was a way of seeing things from an aquatic point of view — a perspective, the Turk had explained, thought to diverge completely from a human point of view, for instance, or from a so-to-speak terran perspective. It was the waters that had demanded the sacrifice of immurement (at least, that’s what the legend said) — that is to say, sentencing a man to death.
Late that night, slanting beams of moonlight falling on the masonry made human shapes appear here and there on the side of the Wall. “Accursed Turk!” I swore under my breath, believing it was he who had stirred up such morbid images in my mind. It then struck me that the upturned bridge was perhaps the very model of the way tidings good and bad move around our sublunar world. It was very likely that nations did indeed pass messages to each other in that way — signals announcing the coming of their official delegations, with their letters sealed with black wax, a few hundred or a few thousand years in advance.
The chiefs have gathered at the kurultai, and Khan Timur’s yarlik has come: “Never venture over the other side,” it says, “for that ways lies your perdition.” But the more I’m told not to, the more I want to step over and see the cities and the women who are doubled in burnished glass, wearing nothing but a gauze they call mend-afsh (silk), women with a pleasure-slit sweeter than honey, but this damned rock heap won’t let me, it obstructs me, it oppresses me, and I would like to stab it with my dagger, though I know steel has no power over it, for it even withstood the earthquake only two days ago. When the shuddering earth and the masonry were wrestling with each other, I screamed aloud to the quake, “You’re the only one that can bring it down!” But it made no difference, the Wall won out, it smothered the quake, and I wept as I watched the earthquake’s last spasms, like a bull who’s had its throat cut, until, alas, I saw it expire, and my God, did I feel sad, as sad as that other time in the plain of Bek-Pek-Dala, when I said to the commander, Abaga, “I don’t know why, but I feel like screaming,” and he said, “This steppe is called Bek-Pek-Dala, the steppe of hunger, and if you don’t feel your own hunger, you’ll feel the hunger of others, so spur your steed on, my son.” That’s what they all tell me: spur your steed on, never let it stop, son of the steppe, but this lump of stone is stopping me, it’s in my way, it’s rubbing up against my horse, it’s calling to its bones, and I myself feel drawn in to its funereal mortar, I don’t know how, but it’s made my face go ashen, it’s making me melt and blanch, aaah. .
The days drag along as wearily as if they had suddenly been broken by old age. We haven’t yet managed to recuperate from the shock we had suffered at the end of this week.
Ever since his chariot halted at our tower and he said, “I am from Number 22 Department of Music,” I have felt a foreboding of evil, or something very much like it. When I asked him what the role of his department was and whether he really meant to put on concerts or operatic pieces for the soldiers and workers on the Wall rebuilding project, he laughed out long and loud. “Our Department hasn’t been involved in that sort of thing for ages!” What he then explained to us was so astounding that at one point my deputy interrupted him with a plaintive query: “Is all that really true, or is this a joke?”
We had of course heard that, over the years, some departments and sections of the celestial hierarchy, while retaining their traditional names, had seen their functions entirely transformed — but to learn that things had gone so far as to make supplying the emperor with sexual performance-enhancing drugs the main job of the navy’s top brass, while the management of the fleet was now in the hands of the palace’s head eunuch, well, nobody could easily have got their mind around that. But that’s not the whole story, he said. “Do you know who’s now in charge of the copper mines and the foundries? Or who’s the brains behind foreign policy these days? Or the man in charge of public works?”
Our jaws dropped as, with smug satisfaction at his listeners’ bewilderment, he answered his own questions, as if he were throwing old bones to hungry dogs, Lowering his voice, he confided that the institution now responsible for castrating eunuchs and for running the secret service was the National Library. Leaving us no time at all to catch our breath, he went on to reveal that in recent times the clan of the eunuchs at the imperial palace had seized an untold amount of power. In his view they might soon be in complete control of government, and then China might no longer be called the Celestial Empire, or the Middle Empire, but could easily come to be known as the Empire of Celestial Castration. .
He guffawed for a while, then his face darkened. “You may well laugh,” he said, “but you don’t realize what horrors that would bring in its wake.” Far from smiling, let alone laughing, our expressions had turned as black as pitch. Despite which, he went on prefacing all his remarks with “You may well laugh, but. .” In his mind, we were laughing without realizing the calamity that would come of it. Because we did not know that emasculation multiplies a man’s thirst for power tenfold, and so on.