The Empress’s Audience with the Princes

The Empress’s Audience with the Princes turns a rescue mission into a public proclamation of empire. In a circle of ships on the open sea, the Empress appears in luminous regalia, stages a night-long spectacle, and then tells the assembled rulers that the King of Esfi is now the supreme monarch of their world. Her language of protection, hereditary right, and peace sits beside the military power that has already destroyed fleets and forced nations to submit. The audience is both ceremonial encounter and imperial settlement: the spectacle makes sovereignty visible, while the Empress’s command makes its consequences unmistakable.

From intervention to imperial audience

The audience follows the Empress’s decision to aid her native country, which she says is threatened by many nations seeking to destroy or weaken its naval power. Before meeting its commanders, she sends a letter identifying herself as a powerful princess from another world and offering assistance, asking them to state when they want her help. The delay in their council’s reply angers her, and she briefly resolves to depart without helping. The Duchess of Newcastle persuades her to be patient, explaining that councils are slow because their members hold different opinions and prolong debate with speeches and doubts.

When the Empress does meet her countrymen, she presents her intervention as a choice of loyalty over self-interest. She says that although she is now an absolute princess and Empress of an entire world, she remembers having been a subject of this kingdom, and will relinquish her own tranquility, riches, and pleasure rather than see it ruined. She promises to destroy its enemies and make it the most powerful nation in the world. The speech offers gratitude and safety as the return she seeks, but its promise of overwhelming victory already anticipates a transformation much larger than defense.

That transformation proceeds through naval destruction and tribute. The Empress asks neighboring maritime nations to pay tribute to the King of Esfi; when they refuse, she orders their ships destroyed. They eventually submit, making the King master of the seas and, through the importance of maritime trade, effectively master of the world. When the subjected nations later unite against him, she again destroys their naval power. States able to live without foreign trade, and those whose commerce is entirely overland, remain outside this first settlement. The Empress threatens to burn their towns and cities if they will not submit; after the initial destruction of smaller towns, fear spreads and most of the world grants her demand. One country resists because it rarely receives rain, but the Empress’s forces exploit its annual tide to set its raised houses ablaze, destroy property, and make the land barren for that year. By the time she summons the princes, the King of Esfi’s ascendancy has been secured by repeated coercion, not simply agreed to at a diplomatic gathering.

The gathering and its spectacle

The Empress invites the princes to meet on the open sea. Each arrives according to the distance of his country and the length of his voyage; together, their ships form a wide circle, which the Empress’s own vessels close. She appears on the water in imperial robes, with Star-stone set near her face in her hair. Its radiance makes those present take her for a celestial being or an uncreated goddess. They marvel not only at her beauty but at her power to walk on water and destroy whole nations.

The entertainment she promises for the darkest part of the night intensifies that impression. Fire-stones light the air and sea until both appear to be burning, frightening the spectators into believing they may be destroyed. The Empress then extinguishes those lights and appears in her garments of light. The Bird-men carry her into the air, where she shines like the sun, before setting her down again on the water. Fish-men sing from beneath the sea, and Bird-men answer from above; the exchange makes air and sea seem to speak to one another in a dialogue of song. The performance is not incidental pageantry. It gives the princes a staged experience of the forces that have already defeated resistance: the same resources that can terrify an audience can also make the Empress’s authority seem supernatural.

At daybreak, the princes see the Empress enter the ship of the King of Esfi. She confers with him and assures him that she is ready to assist whenever he requires it, adding that she lacks no intelligence. She then returns to the center of the circle and asks the princes to draw nearer so they can hear her. The progression from distant apparition to audible address makes spectacle give way to formal declaration, without diminishing the power that spectacle has established.

The declaration and its political terms

The Empress addresses the rulers as great and famous monarchs, but defines their place in relation to the King of Esfi. She describes him as unjustly attacked by nations attempting to take his hereditary rights and prerogatives over the Narrow Seas. Heaven, she claims, has rewarded him for those injuries with absolute power, making him the head monarch of the world. Any ruler who envies that power, she warns, cannot prevent it; resistance will bring loss without victory. Her advice is to pay tribute faithfully, so that the princes may live peacefully and happily and receive Heaven’s blessings.

The speech converts a military outcome into a claim about justice and divine favor. The King’s absolute authority is presented not merely as the result of the Empress’s campaigns but as a heavenly reward for the wrongs done to him. Yet the terms offered to the princes are shaped by the record of force that precedes the address: refusal has already led to burned ships, destroyed towns, and devastated homes. Peace is promised as the consequence of recognizing a hierarchy whose power has been demonstrated in advance. The gap between the language of peaceful submission and the coercion that secures it is central to the audience’s political meaning.

The Empress’s own account also holds protection and dominion together. In her earlier appeal, she frames the expedition as assistance to her native country and says that she seeks acknowledgment of her power, love, and loyalty, not a bargain for personal advantage. In the final address, she presents the King’s supremacy as the just settlement of aggression against his hereditary rights. But the resulting order extends well beyond repelling attackers: maritime states are made tributary, and the campaign against noncompliant powers establishes the King as head monarch of the world. The audience gives that expansion a ceremonial and moral vocabulary even as its conditions remain enforced by military capacity.

Departure and significance

After the declaration, the Empress asks the princes’ ships to move back. Her own fleet enters the circle without any visible aid from sails or tide. Once she has boarded her vessel, the fleet immediately sinks beneath the sea, leaving the spectators profoundly amazed; she will not allow it to surface again until it reaches the Blazing-World. The exit is part of the political performance: the assembled rulers have seen her arrive, command attention, pronounce their new obligations, and vanish with the force that makes those obligations credible.

The audience thus marks both the completion of the Empress’s rescue of her native country and the creation of a world-wide tributary order for the King of Esfi. Its staged wonder echoes the Empress’s earlier use of flame and light in religious conversion, where material spectacle is used to shape belief without force or bloodshed; here, however, spectacle accompanies a program explicitly backed by destruction. Her appearance encourages the princes to see her as more than mortal, while her speech insists on the limits of their political independence. The episode’s central contrast is not between power and peace as separate conditions, but between peace promised by a sovereign and the coercion through which that sovereign makes the promise binding.