In two years Lord Pháò had been forgotten by all save his family and two or three allies who still feared exposure for their part in his embezzlements, and none suspected that it was he who had despatched the auspiciously dodecagonal silver box that arrived one day as a gift for the king, ostensibly from a tiny maritime principality far to the north. The Lord Mwíá was present when the box was opened in the throne-room and discovered to contain, wrapped in indecipherably embroidered silk, a single tear-shaped black seed.
The seed was planted and by the end of the year, having consumed perhaps three men’s share of water, had grown in the royal gardens to a respectable bush whose nodding honey-scented golden flowers held anthers that were, in one specimen of three, not merely golden but true gold, as the court assayer confirmed when a flower fell loose under its own weight and was brought to him for analysis. Thereafter the popularity of the flower knew no bounds within the city, for though it was evidently a plant of a temperate clime quite unlike the desert clime of the city, it would grow and flourish if watered well and yield many times its own keep in gold by the end of the season.
It was about this time that the Lord Mwíá, present at the unveiling of that first seed, was sent as ambassador to the distant kingdom of Wlûì. In the years that followed he learnt through letters how his natal city grew rich from the flower, managing to keep the source and substance of its wealth safe from outsiders, who were all minutely searched on their departure from the city, whatever the season, lest they have a tear-shaped black seed concealed somewhere on their persons. Families began to devote the water-rations of second and third children to their gardens, preferring to raise one child in luxury than three merely adequately, and the city’s population began to decline for the first time in many centuries.
The last letter Lord Mwíá received from his natal city spoke of how the buds of the flowers were not gold this season, the thirteenth since that first seed had arrived in the city, but blood-red. Thereafter there was silence from the city, and messengers he despatched thither returned to report that its gates were sealed against all comers, nor did any voice reply to their cries for entrance. One messenger, who returned sickening of some mysterious malady, had a little more to add: that a storm had been brewing when he arrived at the city, and the winds blew red above its walls of white marble.
But the messenger was in a delirium when he reported this, lying on his death-pallet, and the Lord Mwíá paid little heed, already sure that some doom had overtaken the city. His standing in the foreign court was now dwindling as the rumors spread of his city’s fall, and he was readily granted permission by the king to depart where he pleased. He arrived at the city alone towards the end of summer, finding the gates sealed, as his messengers had reported, and hearing nothing in response to his cries for entrance. Had he not known of a secret door in the eastern wall, he too would have gone away disappointed.
When he passed through the door and set foot to the streets of the city for the first time in thirteen years, the silence told him at once that some great doom had indeed overtaken her, and the skeleton that sprawled from the doorway of the first house he passed was no surprise. From the shreds of cloth that surrounded it and the lack of smaller bones, he guessed that vultures had fed from the corpse and he imagined how the sky must have been darkened with their wings, for the doom had evidently fallen swiftly upon all in the city. More skeletons glowed white on the street ahead of him, but as he approached he found that they were not those merely of men but of great birds also, whose heavy beaks told him that vultures had perished with the corpses they consumed. The bones of rats too were scattered with men’s and vultures’, as though waves of death had passed in succession over the city’s streets, striking down first men and women and children, and then the creatures that flapped down or crept forth to eat of their flesh.
And the flowers too that had enriched the city so greatly in the brief years before its fall were dead: their shriveled stalks hung from many balconies as he passed with bitter tears to the heart of the city; and here, at the spring that had sustained the city through the now-ended centuries of its existence, he found, on the margin of the marble basin carved to hold the spring’s water, the only life that remained within the city walls: many dozen specimens of the northern flower stooped to contemplate their own beauty in the mirror of the water.
But as that last letter had told him, its petals were now all blood-red. The Lord Mwíá came to the basin and thrust through the flowers, that he might wash his tear-stained face in the water and drink thereof to ease his thirst. So it was that the air around him hazed with the red pollen of the flowers and that he died on the instant as it entered his lungs. He fell forward into the water with a splash, shivering the reflex of the flowers into a sanguineous blur. But soon the ripples passed, and once more amid the silence of universal death the flowers contemplated their own beauty in the mirroring water.