“Sorry,” said Death. “But our garden is already almost perfect, it grows more so with each proper gardener who arrives.”
“I am one,” said the emperor.
“Of course, and we do have a proper job for you” said Death. “Here, put these blinders on so you can pull the weeds properly.”
Xulai thought about this for some time. “The story says that elegance has to be for everyone?”
“No. The story says that if one creates something very good, it becomes an elegance only when other people can enjoy it. If one keeps it to oneself, it can be a talent, a skill, an amusement, but it can’t be an elegance. No elegant singer sings only to himself. No elegant sculptor puts his work in a dark cave. No elegant baker hides his cakes in a closet. No hoarder can create an elegance; he can only be an Elvuk.”
“If it has to be very good, then elegance is always expensive, I guess.”
“Oh, if it’s a thing, the thing itself might be expensive, yes, but even if so, it need not be hoarded. A thing can be very good and cost almost nothing. So, if I have a vase by Um-minchox-di, who was the greatest artist in porcelain the world has seen, I may have acquired it for almost nothing, before he was well known. Or I may have spent a treasury on it. In either case, to become an elegance it must be kept in a place where everyone can see it, where some child who is the next Um-minchox-di can take inspiration from it. If I hide it away, it is as nothing, and, metaphorically speaking, I do not want to wear blinders and pull weeds in among my kinsmen during our afterlife.”
“You have a vase by Um-minchox-di?”
“I do. That was his nickname as a child—Um-minchox-di. ‘Small Muddy Boy.’ ”
“He made things out of mud?”
“As a toddler, yes. And when he achieved artistry, he took it as his name. I don’t even remember his real one. It says ‘Small Muddy Boy’ on his tablet in the clan shrine.”
“And how do I translate the emperor’s name, E’loms Los Velipe Umvok? Great one without . . . ?”
“ ‘Largeness without wisdom number one.’ Just call him Emperor Big Stupid the First.”
She grinned. “So the tea and the dancers were an elegance even though the people along the road didn’t get to drink tea.”
“It’s the same tea everyone drinks every day and the same cakes everyone has on holidays. The elegance, the interesting and unusual part, was you and Abasio and your father. That’s what they came to see. And they got to see the parasol dancers. You didn’t see the dancers after we came inside, but they danced all the way down the hill and back to the pier for anyone who cared. A lot of people stayed, just for that. The dancers, too, wished to be an elegance, and so did the people who stayed to watch them.”
“Precious Wind says the parasols are held over your head by ordinary people. But the dancers aren’t ordinary people.”
“The dancers are ordinary people who happen to dance exceptionally well. Ordinarily, the people who hold the parasols are picked by lottery; for special occasions, we use people picked for special contributions. You and Abasio and Justinian were a special occasion, so we did an elegance.”
When they rejoined Abasio and Justinian, Lok-i-xan led them through busy corridors to a ground-level exit and from there to an inlet where a boat waited to take them to meet the Sea King.
The site of their afternoon meeting was on the far side of a small island out in the harbor, not a great distance from the pier where they had docked. It was unoccupied and it held no evidence it had ever been occupied. Except for the small stretch of sandy beach on the far side and a few twisted trees that had grown up in pockets of blown soil, the island was almost all stone. Chunks of it extended into the sea, great spray-slick brown boulders that hunkered in the gentle surf like the slumped backs of giants asleep in their bath. When the boat and its oarsmen had left them and gone well away from the little island, Lok-i-xan went to the edge of the sand and called: “Xaolat . . . al . . . Koul.”
“Master of the Sea,” Xulai translated to herself. For a while, nothing happened. Xulai and Abasio exchanged shrugs. When they had begun to think nothing would happen, one of the huge boulders in the surf moved. At several places around it, other, smaller stones appeared, smooth and shining, rising briefly above the water, then sinking again as the monstrous central bulk turned and came toward the beach, where it heaved upward to lie in the shallows. Enormous tentacles coiled and uncoiled; two huge eyes opened. A voice that held its own echo said: “Welcome, Abasio. Welcome, Justinian.”
“Kraken,” breathed Abasio.
“Yes,” said Lok-i-xan, taking him and Xulai by their hands as he had done during their walk through the city. “Come.” He led them almost to the edge of the sea. The tip of a tentacle appeared. Lok-i-xan put out his hand, took the tentacle tip, bowed, gestured Abasio forward, and placed it in his hand.
Abasio was wishing Blue was with him. Blue would have loved this. He shook hands with the kraken and bowed. “I am deeply honored,” he said.
The great eyes stared at them and through them. A voice full of the liquid flow of the sea said, “Welcome, Abasio. Be one of us.”
“Xulai,” her grandfather said, beckoning.
She stood as though stunned. Abasio saw her face, reached for her, tilted her head back. “You’re all right. What’s happening?”
“I remember him,” she whispered.
“That’s all right. I remember a lot of very strange stuff, too. Just now, I think you should meet the . . . Sea King.”
He said, more loudly, over his shoulder, “She remembers you, Sea King.”
“Ah,” said the kraken. “She has had sea dreams.
