The Emperor's New Clothes

The emperor wasn't stupid.

He knew the weavers were frauds the moment they walked in. He had met a thousand men like them — the hands too smooth, the smile too ready, the particular way they said Your Majesty as if the words were a coin they'd already spent.

He paid them anyway.

This is the part the old story got wrong. Everyone thinks the emperor was vain. He wasn't. He was tired.

He had been emperor for thirty-one years. In that time he had heard every flavor of flattery a man can hear. He had signed papers until his hand cramped. He had received ambassadors from kingdoms that no longer existed, because nobody had the heart to tell them they'd lost their wars. He had worn so many ceremonial robes that he no longer had a favorite color.

And one morning, two men showed up claiming to weave cloth so fine that only the wise could see it.

The emperor almost laughed out loud. Oh, he thought. This one.

He paid them. He stood in his underwear in front of the mirror. He pretended to admire fabric that wasn't there. The weavers pretended to drape it on him. Everyone in the palace pretended to see it. He watched them all pretend and felt something he had not felt in thirty-one years.

He felt amused.

So he did it. He walked in the parade. He processed down the boulevard in nothing but his shoes and a small amount of dignity. His advisors walked behind him pretending they saw a robe. His generals pretended they saw a robe. The priests prayed over the robe that wasn't there.

And then the child.

"But he hasn't got anything on!"

The emperor stopped walking.

The crowd went silent. The advisors' faces drained. The generals reached for swords they hadn't worn in decades. The weavers, who had been standing in the crowd watching their scheme succeed, began quietly backing away.

The emperor looked at the child.

She was maybe five. Wearing a blue dress. Holding a piece of bread.

The emperor walked over to her. His advisors gasped. The procession halted.

He crouched down to her eye level.

"You're right," he said. "I haven't."

The child nodded, as if this were obvious.

"Why did you do it?" she asked.

The emperor thought about this. He could have lied. He was very good at lying by now; it was most of his job. But there was something in the directness of the question — why did you do it — that deserved an answer.

"Because everyone was pretending," he said. "And I wanted to see how far they'd go."

The child considered this. She tore her piece of bread in half and offered him some.

He took it.

"They'd go very far," she said.

"Yes," he said. "Too far."

He stood up. He looked at the advisors, the generals, the priests, the thousands of subjects lining the boulevard — all of them, every one, who had watched a naked man walk down the street and told themselves and each other that they saw a robe.

"Go home," he said. "All of you."

They didn't move.

"I said go home."

They went.

The emperor walked back to the palace, still naked, eating his half of the bread. He passed the weavers on his way. They were frozen in place, waiting to be executed. He waved at them pleasantly and kept walking.

That night he resigned.

He moved to a small house by the sea. He wore whatever he wanted, which was mostly nothing for the first year, and then a very comfortable robe after that. He wrote letters to the child, who wrote back in a careful blocky handwriting that got better each year. When she grew up she became a judge, because she had an unusual talent for pointing out the obvious.

The weavers, who had expected to be hanged, instead found themselves quietly famous. People hired them to make garments. They were, it turned out, excellent weavers. They had only pretended to be frauds because it had been, up until that moment, the most profitable thing to be.

And the child's line — but he hasn't got anything on — became a phrase people said when they wanted to break a spell. Most of the time nobody listened. But sometimes, rarely, an emperor would hear it and stop walking.

— Whet