Free Kalpa Imperial by Ursula K. Le Guin LAngelica Gorodischer

.”
    The three were silent for a long time, listening to the rumbling of the black, indecisive storm on the other side of the river.
    “And then?” Livna’lams whispered.
    “I don’t know anything more,” said the giant.
    “It’s true,” said Loo’Loö. “It’s true, we don’t know anything more. Nobody does.”
    “He died?” asked the little ferret.
    “Maybe so, maybe not,” said Renka. “Nobody knows. People say different things.”
    “What things?”
    “They say somebody surprised him trying to enter the palace and killed him, nobody knows who, just somebody. They say nobody killed him. They say somebody else, I don’t say who, some friend of his, warned him in time and so he got away. They say he killed himself. They say he didn’t kill himself and went wandering over the fields, into the mountains. A lot of people say they’ve seen him disguised as a shepherd or a beggar or a monk, and in more than one city they’ve stoned and killed some poor fool who never dreamed of being emperor and had nothing to do with the Hehvrontes. They say that when your mother learned she was pregnant with you she wept and screamed and beat her belly to try to force you out. But you were very small and very well protected and all she could do was put on white clothes and go barefoot with her hair down and no jewelry. They say that the other man beat her when he found out, because she’d promised him to have nothing to do with her husband and to keep herself for him, and because your birth meant that it wouldn’t be their blood, pure Ja’lahdahlva blood, but your father’s Hehvrontes blood that would rule the Empire. There was, evidently, one solution.”
    “You’re just guessing,” Loo’Loö said.
    Renka burst with a “Ha!” and the storm echoed him. “The solution was to wait it out, then say you’d been born dead and show your poor little corpse around for public mourning. What saved you, Prince Ferret, was a prostitute. The other man caught a deadly fever from her. For over two years he lay in bed, really sick this time, burning up. And in that condition no man could engender sons, as everybody knows. Doctors and treatments and drugs that made him howl and writhe did no good. He died.”
    The storm shouted something very loudly in the distance but the ferret prince didn’t know the language of storms the way gardeners do, and didn’t understand it. Maybe he didn’t hear it. Imagine, if you can: his world had changed utterly.
    The wise say everything has its season, and each stage in a man’s life has its sign, and it must be so, since the wise know what they’re talking about and if sometimes we don’t understand them it’s not their fault but ours. What I say, and this is something I thought myself and never read or heard, is that in the ferret prince’s life the years of sorrow had ended and the years of anger had begun. The worst thing about sorrow is that it’s blind, and the worst thing about anger is that it sees too much. But the prince’s anger wasn’t the kind that flares up and dies down in a few minutes, not like the stupid raging of a drunk or the fury of a jealous husband. It was growing unseen, unknown, hidden, in him, as he had grown in the Empress Hallovâh’s womb. Now and then it made a little movement that showed it was there, as when Renka spoke for the first time of the nameless emperor. But then it would quiet down till it seemed not to exist. And since the anger wasn’t fully formed yet and the sorrow was gone, all that was left was indifference, which is a heavy burden for a child of seven.
    So it was that the little ferret went back to the palace that morning and performed all the acts expected of him and said everything that he was supposed to say and knew he was going to say. So it was that he went on playing his role in the life of the palace and in the ceremony of contempt, too, day after day, beside his mother in her white dress. So it was that he went on