The Pale Palace Over the River

"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.

The book was small, but it was dense. Each page showed a different flower: white ones, blue ones, pale yellow, the color of weak tea. He made a list of what he could name and what he could not.

He went to the seed merchants in the lower city. He went to the spice sellers. He went to the old women who kept gardens on their rooftops, and to the monks of the small stone monastery outside the walls, who cultivated certain plants for the making of medicines and were not supposed to speak to anyone about them. He traded for bulbs, for cuttings, for tiny paper packets of seed that had come across deserts and over mountains. He wrote down, beside each, the name of the person who had given it to him, so that he would remember.

By the end of the second week, the fourth rooftop was no longer bare. He had built long stone beds along the parapets, and smaller pots in between, and a shallow basin at the center that he filled each evening from the well. He had planted moonflower and evening stock, the four-o'clock, the night-blooming jasmine, the great white cereus whose single flower opens once in a year and dies by morning. He had planted a thing called lady-of-the-night, which he had not known existed until an old spice seller whispered the name to him across a counter and slid a slip of stem into his palm.

He also planted, hidden among the others, a small cutting of something he had found in the lower city. It was a common plant, with a small blue flower, and it did not bloom only at night. But he had seen it growing in the cracks of a wall where a child had been buried the year before, and the mothers in that quarter had made of it a kind of secret. They believed, without being able to say why, that the plant was kinder to sorrow than any other.

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 nineteenth night, the moonflower opened.

He had been sitting on the parapet, watching the basin. The boys were asleep in a corner, their arms folded over their faces against the mosquitoes. The first flower was a small white trumpet, no larger than a man's thumb, and it uncurled so slowly that he could not, at first, say exactly when it had begun. One moment it was a closed spiral. The next moment the spiral was looser. The next, there was a hint of white at the tip. Then, all at once, it was open, and the air had changed.

The smell was a kind of green sweetness. He remembered his mother, suddenly, very clearly. He could not have said what he remembered of her — not her face, exactly, nor any words she had spoken, but the feeling of being held by someone who was paying close attention to something small. He sat on the parapet and cried, quietly, for a few minutes, and then he wiped his face on his sleeve and went to fetch the sultan.

The sultan came in his house-robe, with no crown, with one attendant carrying a paper lantern. He walked the length of the roof slowly, looking at the beds. The moonflower was open. The evening stock was not yet out. The jasmine was thinking about it. The sultan stood by the eastern parapet and looked at the small blue cutting there — which, because it was not a night-bloomer, was closed — and he said, "What is this one?"

"It is a kindness, my lord. I do not know its proper name."

The sultan looked at him for a long moment. He did not ask more. He went back inside.

For the next week, the sultan came every night. He walked the roof. Sometimes he spoke to Idin. More often he did not. He would stand by a particular bed and look at a particular flower for what seemed like hours, and then he would go down again, and the next morning the viziers would find the scrolls still untouched.

The garden grew. By the end of the second month, the roof was a thicket of pale bloom from the parapets inward. The four-o'clocks opened at the precise hour they were named for. The cereus, on the seventh night, opened its single enormous flower, and the smell of it was so strong that the attendants on the floor below woke and thought the palace was on fire.

And something else began to happen.

Idin noticed it first as a sound. There was a small door in the inner stairwell that led down to the third floor, and from it, on certain nights, he began to hear footsteps. Not the footsteps of courtiers — those were soft-soled, deliberate, accompanied by the click of beads. These were quicker, lighter, and came in pairs. Sometimes there was a child.

He said nothing. He watched.

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."

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."

"Yes, my lord."

"I told you to build flowers."

"I did, my lord."

The sultan was quiet for a long time. The woman with the boy had stood up. She was looking at the ground. The old man had not moved.

Then the sultan said, "Bring me the scrolls."

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 lower terraces are being neglected," he said.

"Yes, my lord. I am sorry."

"You cannot tend both. I will give you four more boys. Hire them from the city. Pay them from my house, not from the gardener's purse."

"Yes, my lord."

"And the gate to the second stairwell will be left open. At night."

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.

"You must come at night," the sultan said again, and he smiled, and Ohan went away, and the court continued.

For many years after, the roof garden bloomed each night. The sultans who came after Sultan Nelek were told the story, and some of them kept the gate open, and some of them did not. The manuscript with the gold borders was taken down from its case and put in a place where anyone could see it. Idin grew old in the palace. He never married. He had a small house near the lower terraces, and a cat, and a copy of his mother's book, which he had asked the palace scribes to make for him, page by page, and which he kept on a low table beside his bed.

On the night he died, the boys who worked for him carried him up to the roof, because he had said he wanted to see the moonflower one more time. It was not yet open when he stopped breathing. It opened a few minutes later, slowly, the way his mother had painted it, in gold and white, and the boys sat with him until the sun came up, and then they closed his eyes and went down.