Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

In the morning Gopak Semivinvor summoned his entire crew, the twenty men and women who had worked under his supervision for so long, some of them nearly as long as he himself had been major-domo. “We will dismantle the building at once, and reposition it by ninety degrees, a little more or a little less, so that it faces in this direction,” he said, holding his hands out in parallel along the lines gouged in the lawn to indicate how he meant the palace to be turned.

They were obviously dismayed. They looked at one another as though to say, “Is he serious?” and “Can the old man have lost his mind?”

“Come,” Gopak Semivinvor said, clapping his hands impatiently. “You see the patterns in the grass. These two long lines: they mark the place where the Coronal’s bedroom window must face when the rebuilding is complete.” To his foreman he said, “Kijel Busiak, you will have a row of stakes driven immediately into the ground along the lines I’ve drawn, so that there’ll be no chance of confusion later on. Gorvin Dihal, you will arrange at once for the weaving of a complete set of new binding-cords for the canes, since I fear the ones that exist will not survive the dismantling. And you, Voyne Bethafar—”

“Sir?” said Kijel Busiak timidly.

Gopak Semivinvor stared toward the foreman in annoyance. “Is there some question?”

“Sir, is it not true that the story that the building was designed to be taken apart and quickly reassembled is nothing but a myth, a legend, something that we tell to visitors but don’t ourselves believe?”

“It is not,” Gopak Semivinvor said. “I have studied the history of the Summer Palace deeply for many decades, and I have no doubt not only that it can be done, but that it has been done, over and over again in the course of the centuries. It simply has not been done recently, that is all.”

“Then you have some manual, sir, which would explain the best way of carrying out the work? For of a certainty no one alive has any memory of how the thing is done.”

“There is no manual. Why would such a thing be necessary? What we have here is a simple structure of bamboo canes joined by silken cords and covered with a roof of the same sort. We unfasten the cords; we part the roof-beams, remove them, and set them aside; we take down the outer walls cane by cane. Then we draw a careful plan of the interior and remove the interior walls also, and restore them in the same relative positions, but facing the new way. After which, we reinsert the canes of the walls in their foundation-slots and reconstruct the roof. It is simplicity itself, Kijel Busiak. I want the work to commence at once. There is no telling when Lord Dekkeret will choose to appear in our midst, and I will not have a half-finished palace sitting here when he does.”

It did seem to him, as he contemplated the task, that the old tales of taking the building down and putting it back together in a single day must be just that: old tales. The job appeared rather more complicated than that. More likely it would take a week, ten days, perhaps. But he foresaw no difficulties. In the heat of the excitement that suffused his spirit at the thought that a royal visit was at last imminent, he could not doubt that it would be child’s play to dismantle the palace, shift every orientation by ninety degrees, and re-erect it. Any provincial architect should be capable of handling the job.

There were some other mild protests, but Gopak Semivinvor was short with them. In the end his will prevailed, as he knew it must. The work began the next day.

Almost at once, unanticipated problems cropped up. The roof-beams turned out to be slotted together most intricately at the building’s peak, and the jointures by which they were fastened to the supporting columns and the upper tips of the canes that formed the building’s walls were similarly unusual in design. Not only was the style of them antiquated but the technique of fitting the tenons into the mortises was oddly and needlessly baffling, as if they had been designed by a builder determined to win praise for his originality. Gopak Semivinvor heard little about this from his workmen, for they feared the old man’s wrath and suffered under the lash of his impatience. But the work of disassembling the building went on into a second week, and a third. Gopak Semivinvor now was heard to say that it might be best to dismiss the whole batch of them and bring in younger workers who might be more cunning practitioners.

The ends of many of the beams broke as they were pulled apart. The unusual slots cracked and could not be repaired. An entire interior wall crashed down unexpectedly and the canes were shattered. Word went forth to Sippulgar for replacements.

Eventually, though—the whole process took a month and a half—the Summer Palace had been transformed into a heap of dismembered canes, many of them too badly damaged to be re-used. The foundation, laid bare now, proved to be also of cane, badly disfigured by dry rot. A number of the slots into which the canes of the wall had been inserted swelled through an uptake of humid air as soon as the canes they had held were removed, and it did not appear as if the old canes could be inserted in them again.

“What do we do now?” Kijel Busiak asked, as he and Gopak Semivinvor surveyed the site of the devastation. “How do we reassemble it, sir? We await your instructions.”

But Gopak Semivinvor had no idea of what to do. It was clear now that the Summer Palace of Lord Kassarn was by no means as simple in form as everyone had thought; that it was, rather, a complex and marvelous thing, a little miracle of construction, the eccentric masterpiece of some great forgotten architect. Taking it apart had inevitably caused great damage. Few of the original components of the palace could be employed in the reconstruction. They would have to construct a new palace, a flawless imitation of the first one, from the beginning. Who, though, had the skill to do that?

He understood now that he had, driven by that strange and irresistible pressure at the back of his skull, that eerie sending which had not been a sending of the benevolent Lady, destroyed the Summer Palace in the process of dismantling it. It would not, could not, now be shifted to a more auspicious orientation. There was no Summer Palace at all, any more. Gopak Semivinvor sank down disconsolate against one of the piles of roof-beams, buried his face in his hands, and began to sob. Kijel Busiak, who could not find any words to speak, left him there alone.

After a time he rose. Walking away from the ruined building without looking back, the major-domo took himself to the rim of the island, and stood for a long while at the edge of the Great Lake with his mind utterly empty of thought, and then, very slowly, he stepped out into the lake and continued to walk forward until the water was over his head.

Septach Melayn said, “Again, milady. Up with your stick! Parry! Parry! Parry!”

Keltryn met each thrust of the tall man’s wooden baton with a quick, darting response, successfully anticipating every time the direction from which he would be coming at her, and getting the baton where it needed to be. She had no illusions about her ability to hold her own in any sort of contest with the great swordsman. But that was not expected of her, or of anyone. What was important was the development of her skills; and those skills were developing with remarkable speed. She could tell that by the way Septach Melayn smiled at her now. He saw real promise in her. More than that: he seemed to have taken a liking to her, he who was reputed to have no more interest in women than a stone would. And so, since his return from the Labyrinth, he had begun affording her the rare privilege of private tutoring in the art.