1
OF CATS AND MILK, AND ROYAL RUDENESS
Midnight, in the palace.
Quiet lay smooth like a shine on burnished gold, like the nap on brushed velvet. The Singers of Songs for the Evening Shift breathed slowly, then sang again in low, soothing tones into brass pipes that fed their notes into the Imperial Bedchamber. Their voices blended like water in songs so gentle they could break your heart.
The emperor’s cupbearer’s young second assistant approached the bedroom door bearing a chalice on a tray. Its foamy warm milk surface never stirred. Imperial cupbearers could carry loaded trays across lava fields without the slightest motion rippling the surface of His Exalted Magnificence’s drink. Or so they liked to think.
The second assistant bowed to the porter at the door. The porter’s gaze moved slightly toward a flank of guards concealed by tall scarlet drapes. The chief guard, dressed in a soldier’s gear, stepped forward and motioned to his lieutenant.
“The emperor’s milk.”
The lieutenant bowed to his captain and removed from his pocket his own less glorious cup. The cupbearer’s second assistant poured an ounce of warm milk into the soldier’s cup, then wiped the rim of the emperor’s chalice.
The lieutenant guard slowly drank his portion. He wiped clean his own small cup and slipped it back into his pocket. They all waited, their ears cocked as though straining to hear the sounds in his belly. Just once, the lieutenant thought, it would be interesting if something actually did happen. But that something would likely begin with the stopping of his own heart. Such could be the unhappy fate of an Imperial Warm Milk Taster.
The lieutenant rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He took a deep, healthy, thoroughly unpoisoned breath.
“Very well then,” said the porter to the second assistant. “You will proceed?”
The bearer of the Imperial Warm Milk Cup nodded. It was good of the porter not to treat him like a youth and mention that this was his first time in the sacred bedchamber. “I will proceed.”
The porter tapped a teakwood mallet against a hollow silver flute mounted to the wall. A chime hung in the air, then faded. It was answered by a muffled chime from within the bedchamber.
The cupbearer’s second assistant felt the muscles in his legs contract. He wiggled his toes inside his shiny new shoes. The porter produced a key from one of his pockets, unlocked the great bedchamber door, and swung it open.
Step after solemn step led the cupbearer’s second assistant through the great dim cathedral of a bedchamber, past trickling marble pools where orchids dozed and golden carp flicked their tails, past shocking statues of former empresses and candle-lit shrines to heroic ancestor-emperors from days gone by. Outside, in the palace pleasure gardens, a bird of paradise sang.
A pair of lamps by the Imperial Bed cast a warm red glow upon white silk damask bedclothes. The emperor lay in the middle of the bed, little more than a fitful, restless, thrashing lump beneath blankets and sheets. So much space around him, and so much luxury, marveled the cupbearer’s second assistant, and yet he’s all alone.
“I don’t feel like milk tonight,” said the lump.
The cupbearer bowed and turned to leave.
“Oh, give me some, since you’re here.” The emperor squirmed into an upright position, and the servant reached forward with the cup to press it against His Radiance’s lower lip. Even in the dim light, the cupbearer was dazzled by the luster of the emperor’s silk pajamas and the glint of his golden earrings. Rubies clustered like worshippers across his royal fingers, and his face gleamed where the Ladies of Imperial Ablutions had anointed his skin with hazelnut oil. The long tails of his Imperial Mustache curled in divinely royal spirals of blackest jet. These long mustaches were a point of extreme pride for the emperor. Many an older man could not produce such beauties, and he, not yet twenty-two!
Yet for all this magnificent splendor, the young cupbearer couldn’t suppress an irreverent thought. My youngest cousin could wrestle him to the ground easily. And Divine Emperor or no, he still has pimples.
The emperor sniffed the fragrant warm milk and wrinkled his nose. “Never mind, set it on the table. No. It will spill. Set it on that table. No, don’t. I don’t want it. Pour it out for the cat.”
The cupbearer turned, and turned again with each new instruction, keeping his face and the surface of the milk eternally still. In all his training in how to bear, pour, and proffer the emperor’s beverages, the cupbearer’s second assistant had not fully anticipated how to endure the emperor himself.
“Your Luminous Grace must be looking forward to your birthday,” he ventured, and immediately he regretted it, but there was no stopping his tongue now. “Twenty-two is an auspicious age for a ruler…” His voice trailed off in terror. A cupbearer only spoke when spoken to!
Time quivered like a dewdrop on a petal in the palace pleasure gardens.
The emperor leaned forward. “Who are you,” he said, so slowly, so softly, “to address words to me?”
The cupbearer trembled. What would come next? A month in the dungeons? He held his breath and waited to greet his fate.
“Give the milk to the cat.”
The second assistant nearly jiggled the milk in grateful joy. “Yes, Your Radiance. Immediately, Your Radiance. Thank you, Your Merciful Radiance.”
“Silence!”
The cupbearer’s second assistant turned toward the ivory bowl the emperor had indicated and wondered in his innermost heart if it was too late for him to return home to his uncle’s pig farm and live out his days serving more pleasant creatures. At least the emperor didn’t smell like a pig. The young servant knelt before the Imperial Cat’s bowl to pour. The cat, a gray Persian, lay on a velvet ottoman and watched the proceedings with bored yellow eyes.
The cupbearer tilted the chalice.
“No!”
The cupbearer caught in midair the drop that had escaped.
The emperor’s chest heaved. He clapped his hand against his forehead, clinking the rings on his fingers. “Why have I never seen? Why have the priests not remembered? Demons consort with cats!” He seized the mallet hanging next to the silver flute on his wall, the twin of that which the porter rang, and attacked the flute. Mad notes jangled in the air. He fumed at the second assistant. “Why did you come in here to disturb me with wretched milk?”
The cupbearer set down his tray and prostrated himself on the carpet. To grovel or to run away and not stop running were his only options. Servants had died for less than bringing milk to a fickle-minded monarch who had demanded milk. Or wishing him a happy birthday. Anger the emperor, and old age might never touch your brow. Or so the older palace servants often said. At the time, the cupbearer thought they were teasing him.
Doors from every direction opened, and servants, butlers, guards, the chancellor, a priest, a dancer, a masseuse, a cook, and a confectioner appeared with the speed of leopards and the poise of acrobats, all armed with the tools of their trades. The cat leaped off its ottoman and dove under the Imperial Bed in one smooth swoop.
“The cat,” the emperor hissed. “Banish the cat. Cats consort with demons. Why did none of you think of this before now?”
Jellied fruits quivered on the confectioner’s tray. The dancer’s finger tambourines jingled uncertainly. The priest took a silent step back and hid behind the cook. Only the cupbearer’s second assistant, lying still upon the carpet, could see the cat crouched under the massive bed, its golden eyes reflecting light borrowed from a distant candle.
The old chancellor spoke. “Glorious Lord,” he said in a voice that almost hinted that he found these words amusing, “cats have been part of your royal family’s lives for generations. Your exalted mother had three of them and found them bringers of good luck. I recall how you yourself had a beloved kitten when you were young—”
“Never mind when I was young!” shrieked the emperor. “I am no longer young. I’m an Emperor in Fullness now.” Eyebrows rose among the servants, though this was reckless of their owners. “Ahem. Or I will be one in a week. So don’t tell me what to do, Chancellor. You know how it vexes me. Now rid me of this pestilent cat!”
The cupbearer’s second assistant wormed his body under the bed. In the black gloom underneath the mattress, the cat’s reflective yellow eyes stared at him. “Here, pooss, pooss,” the cupbearer whispered. The cat made no movement. He stretched out a hand and seized the Imperial Cat by the loose skin behind its head. It yowled and curled its body around to lash at him with clawed hind feet. But he did not let go. He pulled the cat out and held it dangling high. His pig-farming cousins had taught him this trick with their own rat-catching cats. Unpleasant though it looked, it didn’t hurt the cat.
The emperor broke off scolding the chancellor and turned to regard the cupbearer’s second assistant and his furious trophy. A beautiful smile curved underneath the spirals of his flawless Imperial Mustaches.
“Thank you, servant,” he said. A thrill of holy joy ran down the cupbearer’s spine. “Henceforth, I pronounce you Imperial Butler. Now I can rest. Banish the cat, banish all cats, and bring me new warm milk. That milk is now cold.”
The original butler melted into the shadows, as did the others who had leaped to the summons. The old chancellor tottered off to the stacks of paperwork involved in actually running an empire. The newly knighted Imperial Butler handed the cat to the Imperial Cat Keeper, an old lady who fled the room before the emperor could decide to execute the Imperial Cat, or all the cats in the empire.
Serenity returned to the bedchamber.
The former cupbearer’s second assistant returned with a new chalice of warm milk, again poison-tested by a bored guard.
The emperor drank his milk and closed his eyes.
A cart of supremely irritated palace cats rumbled off into the night. Villagers along their route dreamed of yowling fiends and wondered what curse their nightmares might foretell.
The guards shifted their feet silently and watched their breaths push the red drapes ever so slightly forward.
The new Imperial Butler visited the wardrobe to request the elegant uniform and glittering shoes befitting his new rank. He switched bedchambers with the demoted butler and contemplated sending a letter home to his mother with the proud news. Uncle Moon’s pig farm, indeed!
Exotic birds in the palace pleasure gardens settled into their nests and tucked their lordly beaks under their riotously colored wings. Peace and order reigned supreme.
And then …
Somewhere in the smallest hours, a tortured scream ripped through the quiet palace. To their astonishment and horror, no one, neither guard nor dancer nor baker nor butler, could open the doors to the Imperial Bedchamber to help. The peepholes that allowed the guards to monitor the emperor’s safety had been fused shut. Any hand that dared to touch the latch of the emperor’s door burned with a red-hot brand, leaving a wound slow to heal.
Guards pounded and cursed. Servants paced and prayed. Dark forces must be at work.
How dark, indeed, they couldn’t fully know until the next morning, when the locks finally yielded and the new butler found the Imperial Bed empty and its sheets disheveled. The emperor himself was nowhere to be seen. His gold ear jewels and ruby rings lay on the floor near his bed.
One window stood open, and the butler ran to see what it might reveal. Outside in the palace pleasure gardens, not a flower was out of place, nor a creature disturbed.
Except, they learned later, for one. With hordes of servants scouring every corner of the castle and grounds, scarcely anyone took notice when, at dinnertime, the Keeper of the Imperial Aviary reported one missing ostrich.
Text copyright © 2017 by Julie Berry
