I don’t want to say that Hans Christian Anderson didn’t tell the whole story. Hans was a noble collector of tales handed down from generation to generation all throughout the countryside. But one has to understand some of the complications with the narrative as it’s been picked up and remembered.
There are many claims to the truth of this story, and, as a scribe, it is my duty to head out and collect them. After spending several weeks canvassing the countryside, I submit this report to you in earnest.
We begin with the initial core story that you may well be familiar with, and it is this:
Many years ago, there was an emperor so vain and fond of new clothes that he spent all his money being well dressed. One day two swindlers came to town and let it be known that they could weave the greatest fabric in all the world. In fact, it was so fine that only those people who were stupid or unworthy of their positions could not see it.
The emperor, dazzled by the idea of dressing in the finest thread in all the world, allowed the swindlers, who pretended to weave the cloth but were really holding empty air, to trick him into making him a fine new outfit.
Then he paraded himself through town, as his courtiers and officers held empty air, pretending it was the train of his gown.
It was a child that pointed at the emperor—a child cloaked in the innocence of their age—who cried out, “that man has no clothes on!”
That’s roughly what everyone remembers, and to tell the story again, it seems like the spell is broken. The high, unworldly clarion call of the child pierces the entire sham and shatters it. The emperor is shamed, and tries to carry on down the street, but knows the truth of it all.
But that’s not how the real world works, is it?
***
Gary (some names have been changed to protect sources) is a distant relative of the child who spoke up in the courtyard.
“I wish she’d kept her little mouth shut, that poor idiot child and her family,” he tells me.
We break our fast just outside one of the smaller villages in the periphery of the emperor’s domain. As far as I can tell, Gary seems to shovel shit for a living, and his boots are stained with it. He wears a simple tunic, a floppy head covering, and has a simple, hard-working face.
Gary eats a single loaf of wheat bread and drinks watered beer.
“No good comes of yelling out at royalty what they ain’t or what they is wearing,” Gary continues.
Certainly, Gary notes, there are far worse things the rulers of the empire have done than walk through a town buck naked. Gary ticks off a list of crimes against serfs, inquisitions, expeditionary wars abroad, colonization on other continents, and rapes never brought to justice.
“A lap in your own skin?” Gary shakes his head and finishes his beer. “Hardly anything for us to get worked up about. If that kid had been raised with a lick of common sense, those weavers would have been paid in a few weeks and moved on, and we’d all of us had a good story to tell. Instead…”
He trails off.
Instead.
Gary sighs. “I knew it was a bad business when he stopped at the Victory Arch and whispered to the head of his guards.”
Moments later men armed with crossbows beat back the crowds and dragged the little girl off in chains for sedition and inciting the crowds to riot.
***
After an evening spent trying cheeses down in the eastern boroughs, I found myself in the company of a member of the privy council smartly dressed in purple hose and a shimmering silk tunic. We ate sliced aged cheese and figs drizzled in honey.
We talk about the gazette that I write my reports for, long respected in four different countries in the region. My subject apologizes for not reading it several times before turning to the reason he has hunted me down to sup with me.
“I don’t want to talk about the clothes, we have to focus on the child,” the representative of the emperor tells me in between a tasting tray of southern red wines.
“The child?”
“Yes.” He waves his glass of wine in the air. “Who was paying her to slander the emperor? Was she under the influence of anti-patriotic concerns?”
The emperor’s court was under siege from the enemy, and that meant everyone in the country needed to come together and get past their divisions.
“But she was just a little child, surely— ”
“Her parents took out a loan from merchants in another country. Another country, can you imagine? And her uncle travels across the border every month. Make sure you write that down. It’s all very suspicious.”
“How exactly?”
But he narrows his eyes. “It’s suspicious. They could be taking money to cause unrest here inside our country.”
“Are they?”
“They could be.”
I write down that the emperor’s representatives think that the girl could be influenced by elements seeking to cause unrest from outside the country.
***
There’s something I have to do next that I don’t want to do. But taking down a full account of what has happened requires it.
Chains rustle gently in the wind, and the cage swings slowly, thunking against the stone walls of the castle as I approach. The little girl inside shivers as the wind kicks up.
She eyes me warily, huddling deeper into a wet wool blanket that someone has given her. I give her a bundle of wax paper with bread and cheese inside, which she greedily scarfs down.
I’ve been told her parents are jailed as well. Her blanket, as well as food and water, have been snuck in at night by relatives who have to walk all the way in from a nearby town.
After some coaxing, the child warms up to me.
“He was stark naked,” she says. The defiance in her tone wobbles a bit. She’s been living in a cage for two weeks. But she does not withdraw the explosive allegation that the emperor was walking, nude, through the middle of town.
“All my life, I been taught to tell nothing but the truth by my parents, my teachers, and my priests. When I saw him walking over the cobblestones, he was nakeder than someone talking a bath. All I did was say it out loud, because I’ll tell you this, everyone was muttering it to themselves.”
“That’s true, but, you know that this cloth is a special cloth,” I countered. “Only certain types of people can see it. It’s only those unusually stupid, or unfit for their office, that cannot see it.”
So many people forget that part of the story.
The child stopped gnawing on a piece of bread and eyed me critically. “I don’t have a station,” she observed. “Are you calling me stupid?”
“I make no such claims,” I said, drawing myself up. “I am only a chronicler of events for the gazette. I write down—”
“Did you go see him?” the child asked. “Go see the emperor and write down what you see instead of talking to me.”
***
After calling on many of the fine houses of the empire and being turned away, I finally am able to talk to a noble who knows how to grant me an audience with one of the weavers in question. This is the closest I can get to seeing the emperor for now, until the next time he goes on a parade.
The weaver wears elegant, imported silk, and insists on showing me the complex machinery that is involved in making the emperor’s new clothes.
“I want to show you this,” he says. “It’s a Garibaldi Loom. Two hundred carefully oiled parts, the most complex, advanced piece of machinery in the entire continent. You can’t deny it, right? You see the machine in front of you, correct? It was imported. Make sure you write down that we have a Garibaldi Loom.”
The weaver stares at me until I write it down, carefully, in my notebook.
“This is a special cloth,” the weaver says. “Only those fit for their office can see it. Do you understand what that means?”
The weaver holds his hands up in the air as if he’s holding something.
“If you truly are worthy of your position,” he says, his eyes glinting in the shadows of the workshop, “then you could see the beauty and craftsmanship of what I’m showing you.”
“I—” want to tell him I can’t see anything.
“Or, and I can’t imagine this applies to you, but, if you’re stupid, you may not be able to see the cloth.”
I am forced to defend my intelligence, explaining my academic pedigree.
“Of course you couldn’t be stupid. Here,” the weaver says, and approaches me. “It’s a scarf. Let me put it on you.”
He acts as if he’s doing me the world’s greatest favor as I’m made to feel like I’m in the circle of an exclusive club as the weaver drapes the scarf around me and nods approvingly. “Keep it. It is a gift to you.”
At the door on the way out, I think the wind nips at my neck a bit, but I’m suddenly not sure.
***
“I mean, from the emperor’s position, you have to imagine it,” says Maximillan Weber, a noble in the court. “Stop getting hung up on whether anyone was naked or not. Imagine you’re given a tool that allows you to determine whether or not people in your administration are worthy of their position or stupid. Wouldn’t you use such a tool?”
Maximallan Weber, as far as I can tell, is not wearing anything at all. Which would normally be quite… alarming.
But to say anything out loud would be to suggest that I was stupid. That’s the political atmosphere in the empire, now. So, whether I think I am stupid or not, I cannot verbalize what I think.
Instead, I do my level best to lock eyes with Maximillan Weber’s eyes and not look down as I take my notes for my story.
“Well?” he asks.
I cannot offer an opinion on a hypothetical, but stammer, “Some would say that it has not been proved that the threads can really do this thing.”
“Have those people proved that the threads _can’t_ do such a thing?”
“It’s impossible to prove a negative—”
“That’s what *they* want you to think,” Maximillan Weber shouts, standing up, much to my distress.
“Who?”
“The enemies of the state. Those dirty people. Foreign influences!” Maximillan gesticulates. “But the emperor didn’t ascend to his position by being an idiot. He’s playing a more advanced game than any of us. Always one step ahead. You mark my words, this disruption will reveal to him who his enemies are and the true state of things inside the borders. This will be a good thing. A great moment in our country’s history.”
I am escorted out of the mansion by Maximillan Weber’s wife. The Lady Weber is draped in a voluminous evening gown.
She notices my look.
“I told my lord that I am far too simple a woman to dare wear threads that would reveal to the world that I married above my station,” she says to me, with a cryptic smile.
***
My last interview about the matter is with the town crier, who stood on a raised platform on the day in question and saw everything. She fills me in on the times of day and the sequence of alleged events.
“Alleged?” She frowns at that word.
“Well,” I explain, “I wasn’t here, so who can say what happened?”
She shakes her head over the beer I have purchased for her. “Until the day I die, I will tell you he was naked. He was nude. He wasn’t wearing any clothes. I saw his genitals.”
Everyone in the tavern stared at us.
“I didn’t,” the town crier says emphatically, “want to see his genitals. Emperor or not, uninvited genitals are the worst.”
“Some would say that the clothes could only be seen by those fit for their stations, or who were not stupid.”
The crier laughs. “Why are you quoting them? They aren’t here, it’s just me and you. You’re dragging them in here to create a conflict when right now, anyone in this establishment knows what they say, right?”
There’s a hearty cheer of assent.
“Listen,” the crier says, leaning closer to me. “You write this down, and you write down what they say. But if it rained last night, and I tell you it didn’t, and Jeffrey over there says it did, one of us is right, yeah? You should be figuring out who got soaked, not just taking care to put both arguments down on paper.”
I am forced to say that she has a point.
“Besides, how do you justify putting children in cages over it all? Talk all you want about differences of opinion, but right now there’s a child hanging in a cage outside a castle wall. If that ain’t a failure of decency I don’t know what is. All this talk about stations and stupidity just obscures a simple fact: that he exposed himself to a lot of people who didn’t want it. Doesn’t matter what the threads are or how they work or don’t.”
And on that, the crier stood up and walked back to the bar, ending our interview.
***
So, what then to make of the emperor’s new clothes?
Well, I am just a scribe. I write it all down, but you are the one who has to decide.
But I do know this: there are strong opinions on either side of the issue of the emperor’s new clothes.