The Pale Palace Over the River

The palace of Kerven stood four stories tall, built of pale stone that the noonday heat made nearly white. By day its walls were blinding; by night they were the color of old milk. From the highest rooftop, one could see the whole city spill downward to the river — tile roofs, courtyards, the dark trees of gardens, the long gray ribbon of water. The sultan, Nelek, had not slept in nineteen days.

He had tried everything the physicians could devise. He had drunk poppy milk and laid on silk. He had been wrapped in cool sheets and sung to by the palace singers. Nothing held. As soon as the sun went down, the sultan would rise from his bed and walk the long galleries, and by the time the birds called he would be standing at some window, looking out over Kerven with the fixed expression of a man who has forgotten how to close his eyes.

The viziers came each morning with their scrolls. They bowed, presented their petitions, read the trade tallies, the tax disputes, the requests for mercy. The sultan listened, but he did not answer. He signed nothing. "I will rule," he said, "when I have seen what cannot be seen in the day."

No one knew what he meant. The chief vizier, a thin man named Ohan, suspected madness. The court astrologer, who had been a friend of the sultan's since boyhood, suspected something more particular: a man whose body had simply refused the ordinary hours, and who was waiting, perhaps, for a different kind of evening.

It was the astrologer who remembered Idin.

Idin was a gardener. He had charge of the lower terraces, where the orange trees grew in long rows, and the oleander, and the slow fountain that ran all day and was still all night. He was twenty-three, quiet, with soil under his nails and a habit of speaking to plants as if they were small, dignified guests. He was also, the astrologer knew, the son of a woman who had once painted the most beautiful manuscript in the sultan's library — a book of night flowers, with gold leaf on every margin, and a peacock at the center of each page whose tail unfurled into a different bloom.

That book was called "The Garden That Opens After Dark." The sultan's mother had commissioned it forty years ago. The woman who had painted it had died when Idin was a boy, and the book had been placed in the locked cases, where only the sultan himself could read it. It had never been opened since the old queen's death.

The astrologer went to the sultan and said, "There is a book you should look at."

"I have seen it," the sultan said.

"You have not seen it in the dark."

That night, the sultan went down to the library with a single candle. He unlocked the case. He opened the book.

The gold leaf caught the candlelight and threw it back in small, broken pieces across the page. The peacock's eye was a moonstone, and the petals around it — he had forgotten how to name them — were painted in inks that seemed to glow. The borders were not merely gold; they were the shapes of leaves and tendrils, and they seemed to grow into the painting at the center, so that the flower itself appeared to be springing from the metal.

Idin had not known his mother's work lived in the palace. He bowed, and his throat was very dry. "If the palace provides the seed, my lord."

"It will provide everything. Take the fourth rooftop. It is bare. Build me a garden that opens only in the dark. I will not rule until I have seen it."

The viziers were furious. The lower terraces had been tended for three generations; the fourth rooftop had been used only for drying linens. To give it to a gardener was to acknowledge, in a way no one quite said aloud, that the sultan's sleeplessness had become the business of the state.

Idin began the next morning. He had his mother's manuscript, which the sultan had sent to him in a cedar box. He set it on a low table in his new workshop, and he turned the pages one by one, slowly, as a man who is reading letters from someone dead.

He told no one of this. He planted it near the eastern parapet, where the wind came first.

Court rituals continued. Each morning the viziers came. The sultan would not see them. They left their scrolls on a long table in the outer hall, where they piled up like fallen leaves. Ohan tried, three times, to have Idin removed; the sultan refused. The chief gardener tried to argue that the lower terraces were being neglected; the sultan sent him a single line of verse, in his own hand, and the man went away quiet.

At night, Idin worked on the roof. He had hired two assistants, boys of fourteen or so, who carried water and held the lamps. The work was slow. Some of the seeds did not take. Some of the cuttings withered. He lost the lady-of-the-night twice, and had to go back to the spice seller for more.

On the eleventh night, he was sitting near the basin with his lamp low, and a woman came up the stairs. She was carrying a small boy on her hip, and the boy was awake, his eyes wide. The woman looked at Idin. She did not run. She said, "We heard there was a garden."

"Who told you?"

"A boy. The boy who works for the water carrier."

The sultan came at the fourth hour, as was his habit. He came up the stairwell and stepped out onto the roof and found it full of people.

He stopped. The attendant with the lantern stopped behind him. The sultan looked at the woman with the boy on her hip. He looked at the old man sitting by the jasmine. He looked at the small blue cutting, which was closed, as it always was, in the dark.

He turned to Idin. "You have filled my garden with the city."

The attendant ran down. He came back with an armful. The sultan sat down on the parapet, in his house-robe, in the smell of jasmine, and he began to read.

He read until morning. The people on the roof did not leave. Some of them slept. The woman with the boy sat with her back against a stone bed, and the boy slept on her shoulder, and the smell of the cereus was so strong that even in sleep the boy breathed more deeply than he had in days.

When the sun began to come up, the sultan stood. He had read every scroll. He had marked them, in his own hand, with his decisions. He looked at the people on his roof, and he looked at the flowers, and he looked at Idin.

The sultan went down. Idin bowed. The woman with the boy looked up at him, and he nodded, and she went down too, and the old man, and the children, and the young women, and by the time the sun was properly up, the roof was empty except for the flowers, which had closed.

The viziers came at the usual hour. The sultan saw them. He signed the scrolls. He held court, briefly, for the first time in months. He did not say what had changed. Ohan, who had wanted Idin dismissed, asked to be told.

"The flowers opened after dark," the sultan said. "You cannot see them in the day. You must come at night."

Ohan, who was a careful man, did not understand. He asked again.