Presently Tana and Nau are down at the harbour to welcome the galleon from Devel. They embrace Taal and Uddo, who for many days will be their guests at the palace. Every evening the four of them sit on a balcony above the trees of the garden, looking back on the days they spent together on Gaul and talking of their islands. It seems that these evenings serve to dissolve all remnants of resentment and ill-will between them. At this time Nau begins to be troubled by a strange illness. One morning she realizes that the skin of her right hand has stiffened, lost feeling and acquired a bluish hue; over the next few days she observes with alarm how these changes progress. Within two weeks the skin has become a smooth, grey-blue shell in which the queen is held captive: Nau is walled in in her own body. She has become a statue of herself, unable to move, unable to speak or even eat. Fortunately the hardening has not attacked her inner organs, so she can swallow pulped food when it is poured carefully into her mouth. The only feature of her outer body which is not grey and immobile is her eyes — two terrified, twitching larvae set in the heavy metal her skin has become. Whenever Tana carries his queen in his arms he watches in the smooth surface of the new metal distorted reflections of the palace — sagging columns, bloated window frames, soft networks of chequered corridors; when he leans in close to her round, gleaming, pitted face he sees in it a grotesque caricature of his own.
Tana takes meticulous care of Nau. He dresses her as if she were an enormous marionette; he carries her into the garden; every evening he bathes her and lays her next to him in their bed. He summons the most celebrated physicians, each of whom recommends a different treatment — one has Nau’s shell of a body coated in rose oil, another daubs it with ass’s milk, another fills the room with smoke produced from the wood of trees that grow on distant Formos. The physicians come and go, but the queen’s shell becomes not the tiniest bit softer. Taal and Uddo declare themselves extremely concerned. Taal summons his court physician, who applies to Nau’s body over several weeks a decoction of Develian herbs. But it seems to Tana that all these cures only serve to make Nau’s skin harder still.
Luminous letters
The royal palace has a square ground plan. Its rooms are on seven floors and entered from seven arcaded galleries joined by a staircase. The galleries enclose an inner courtyard, where a fountain surrounded by palm trees spurts water continuously. The tops of the palms reach to the third gallery. One warm night of a full moon Tana is unable to sleep, and he sees from the movements of Nau’s eyes that she, too, is awake. So he carries his hardened queen from the room with the same care as if she were a priceless statue. Their bed-chamber is on the seventh, highest floor of the palace. In the dark gallery Tana leans his queen against the wall and lets her breathe in the fragrance of the summer night. He sits down on a stone bench beside her, takes up his telescope and studies the moon, which is illuminating the slim columns of the arcades and is reflected in the metal statues of the galleries. The room of Taal and Uddo is on the opposite side of the gallery, and next to this, in an alcove, there is a circular aquarium in which the water is rippling and lit blue by a medusa. This was a gift to Nau from an envoy of the Emperor of China and she keeps it as a kind of living jewel. Apart from the glow of the moon and weak blue light of the medusa — which is like the flame of a gas burner in the wind — the sleeping palace is in complete darkness. (That one story of the Book should tell of Gaul, galleries and telescopes, alchemy and chemistry is an anachronism characteristic of all its parts. The authors of the Book do not use anachronism with any particularly sophisticated intent; they do not use it in conjuring tricks like Jünger or Gracq. Anachronism in the Book tends to be employed carelessly, even naively, and at times it is not even clear whether it appears through negligence, playfulness or a simple ignorance of history.)
Suddenly Tana becomes aware of a muted conversation. Then two shadows appear in the gallery opposite; they flitter about for a while before coming to rest next to the medusa’s aquarium. Tana recognizes the voices of Taal and Uddo. His guests from Devel are too far away for him to understand what they are saying, but he identifies in their tone an evil gaiety which regularly gives way to quiet laughter. Tana is shocked to hear them laughing at a time when all voices in the palace are muffled in sadness. The suspicion is roused in him that the visit of Taal and Uddo to Illim is a mission of evil, an act of treachery that will bring in its wake a new war. There is no way of his approaching his guests so that he might eavesdrop on their conversation — any movement in their direction would be picked up by the moonlight. They would be alerted, too, by the calls of the birds whose cages line the arcades.
Then he makes the happy realization that there is one way in which he can find out what his guests are talking about. Once he, Nau, and Gato were standing in a dimly lit room admiring the beautiful, luminous dance of the medusa when they noticed that the medusa gave an answer to every sound by means of a special movement. Plainly it was able to distinguish the ripple frequency of different sounds and for some reason it would react to a given wave with the same movement each time. (At this point in my reading, the text sprouted one of its “zoological” pockets. These were attached to a page wherever a new species of animal made its first appearance in the Book. There were insertions in these pockets that described the anatomy of the animal, its behaviour and habitat, and how it hunted its prey. Sometimes recipes were recorded in which the flesh of the animal was the main ingredient.) Tana, Nau, and Gato often played a game in which one of them stood next to the aquarium and whispered something while the others tried to work out from the movements of the medusa what had been said. So now, from the other side of the gallery, Tana trains his telescope on the aquarium and sets to reading the luminous blue transcript of Taal and Uddo’s conversation. The medusa delivers this tirelessly, carefully, and always accurately.
Within a few moments Tana is quite appalled. He learns that Taal and Uddo’s amiability is a disguise. His evil guests conspired to put powder from Uddo’s witch’s kitchen in Nau’s wine-glass, and it is this that has turned Nau into a gleaming blue-grey statue. It seems that the plan was devised by Uddo, who has never desisted in her hatred of Nau, and that she persuaded the hesitant Taal to put it into practise. Up there in the gallery Taal asks Uddo if one day a physician might appear on Illim who would find a cure for Nau; laughing, Uddo assures him this is quite out of the question. The formula of the medicine that would restore Nau to her original form is known by her and her alone; it is composed of forty-four ingredients, and if but one of these is missing the medicine has no effect whatever. Then she begins to itemize the ingredients. Tana quickly pulls off his ring, then takes the telescope in his left hand and puts it to his eye; his right hand moves across one of the marble panels laid in the wall, inscribing into it the names of the substances by means of the diamond set in the ring.