Electric Literature No. 4 by Javier Marias

Author:Javier Marias
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, short fiction, literary, anthology, short story, literary fiction, literary journal, javier marias, joy williams
Publisher: Electric Literature

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I say until my twenty-eighth year because it was in that year—the first of that brief, confident era following Heraclios’s crushing victories against the Persians in the east—that an imperial courier burst into the garden where I was sitting with my mother, drinking tea, and handed me a summons. It came from the Keeper of the Seals, and when my mother saw the purple ink she began to fret. She declared I was to be given some high rank and fussed over my appearance, then decided I was to be executed and began to cry, then reversed herself a dozen times more. I didn’t know what to think. The summons itself offered no hints: it only gave directions for when and how I should come to the palace. I was surprised that anyone, much less the Keeper of the Seals, would wish to seek me out. I brushed my mother away and went up to my chamber to spend the rest of the day alone.

When morning came I hired a litter to take me to the Chalke Gate, as instructed. There I showed my summons to the guards, and they admitted me to a courtyard where a large ivy grew. I knew, from one of my father’s stories, what I was seeing. The ivy was nurtured from a clipping taken from the old palace at Rome, and the fountain in the courtyard’s middle—surmounted by a bronze Romulus and Remus—ran with waters brought from all the empire’s corners: the Tiber, the Danube, a spring in Syria, the upper reaches of the Nile. Just beyond the fountain, three men were contesting with an elephant—a spoil from the wars—trying to fit golden covers onto his tusks. A crowd of servants and soldiers had gathered to watch; some had their arms to their noses in imitation of the elephant’s trunk, and were whistling, trying to get him to trumpet.

Stacks of crates filled the other side of the courtyard, and it was from behind one of these that a eunuch, spare and with a shaved head, emerged. Squeezing out of his hiding place, he dusted himself off and came up to me and demanded the summons. After he read it he gave me an oddly close look. Then he ordered me out of the litter and took me past the elephant and through a guarded archway. We walked a few steps down a grand corridor of white marble before he stopped and pulled back a tapestry. Behind it, a narrow passageway snaked off into darkness. He went in ahead of me, guiding me by the sleeve, running his other hand along the brick and repeating something to himself. When we came to a tiny iron door he stopped and turned to face me.

“Say nothing,” he said. “Stand and wait.” Then, twisting and pulling a ring in the door, he opened it and told me to step through.

I had to stoop to clear the topstone, and by the time I stood on the other side, the door had shut behind me.

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