The City

by Stella Gemmell

  She asked him, “Why has the messenger gone towards the City? To arrange your ransom?”

  “I’m not important enough to ransom.”

  “But they were looking for you? Why would the enemy be looking for you?”

  “I don’t know. But I expect it is a matter of politics. Our general, our late general, I suspect and fervently hope, used to say everything is about politics.”

  “I despise Randell Kerr. And I despise his sentiments. The man’s a fool, a dangerous fool, yet you’re quoting him.”

  Fell grinned at her, and the anger in her chest drifted away and she laughed. She realised she was enjoying herself. Here, at the end of the world, she felt happy for the first time in years. She saw the others looking at them curiously.

  “Can we survive this?” she asked him softly.

  “I have asked myself that every day of the last seven. We are still here.”

  She had finished the dressing, noting that the wound was healing slowly. She packed away the bandages. Then she leaned forward and kissed Fell on the mouth. He tensed, then she felt his lips soften and his tongue touch briefly against hers, and she pulled away again. A promise, she thought. If we survive this.

  “The messenger’s coming back,” announced Garret.

  The mounted man galloped up and flung himself from his horse to speak to the grey leader. Then he disappeared into the darkness with the rest of the riders.

  Yet more time passed and nothing happened once more, until a tinge of pink appeared in the eastern sky and Indaro could make out the shapes of friends and enemies around her.

  Doon stood and stretched. “What’s going on?” she asked irritably. “Why don’t they just kill us and get it over with?”

  But Indaro wasn’t listening. “Can you hear that?” she replied, cocking her head.

  They all looked to the west. Under the lightening sky they could see a troop of cavalry issuing from the distant City. Indaro’s heart lifted. Relief, at last. She swung back, raising her sword. But the grey riders were casually packing their saddlebags, getting ready to leave.

  “What are they doing? What’s going on?” she asked, looking to Fell.

  He shook his head. “I’ve no idea.”

  Within moments the City troop arrived. They drew to a halt many paces distant. There were just seven riders—a woman leader and six warriors in black and silver. The leader stepped her mount forward. Indaro recognised the short grey hair, the skinny, ungainly frame. She frowned. That woman Saroyan again. Was this unlikeable woman dogging her steps? Why did she appear each time there was a mystery? She and the grey leader walked their mounts to one side and talked quietly together. The two teams of riders stared at each other across the heads of the five bemused captives.

  Time passed and voices were raised, then lowered. Bargaining for our lives, Indaro thought. What will the bargain be? What are our lives worth? Finally the man and the woman trotted their mounts back to their respective lines. The woman nodded her head in a valedictory gesture to the greys’ commander. The City riders were about to leave again.

  Fell stepped forward. “Saroyan!”

  The lord lieutenant looked at him as if seeing him for the first time.

  “I am Fell Aron Lee,” he announced. “I was decorated by the emperor for valour after the Battle of Coulden Moor, and I hold two gold suns for twenty years’ service. With me are four faithful warriors of the City who have courageously offered their lives in its service every day for more than four years.”

  He lifted his voice again to a bellow. “Would you turn us over to the enemy to die like dogs in the dust?”

  Indaro waited, tensed. For a long moment there was no sound but the sighing of the breeze past their ears and the breathing of horses, and the only movement Saroyan’s mount turning. It was a young beast, and skittish, but the woman paid it no mind as it trotted lightly in a circle. Then she gripped it with her thighs and said a soft word and it shook its mane and settled down.

  “Your orders are to go with these troops,” she told Fell coldly. “They will not kill your warriors if you go quietly.”

  Fell said, “We will not surrender to the enemy at the word of a traitor.”

  The woman appeared not to be offended, only impatient. She walked her horse over to Fell. Indaro stepped up to Fell’s shoulder. Saroyan glanced at her with dislike, then she leaned from her saddle. The moonstone earring gleamed in the rays of the rising sun.

  “You can keep your team alive or condemn them to death,” Saroyan said. “You can go with these soldiers trussed like a deer and laid across a saddle or riding like a free man. Your choice. Either way you will go, Fell Aron Lee.”

  Then she dropped her voice. “This is about Arish,” she said, “and a promise made long ago, which you now have a chance to honour.”

  What’s Arish? Indaro thought. She watched Fell’s face tighten and his eyes narrow. There was a long moment when he seemed turned to stone then, stiffly, he nodded.

  Saroyan spoke two words in a foreign tongue to the grey leader. Then the City cavalry turned and rode back towards the distant wall, leaving their soldiers in the dust.

  At an order the greys mounted, and five riderless horses were brought round from the rear. The leader told the City soldiers to surrender their weapons and mount up. At Fell’s word they gave up their swords. They helped Stalker onto a horse then each took a mount.

  The leader rode up to Fell. “Your four soldiers,” he said in his strange accent, “are a guarantee of your good behaviour. Do I have to bind your hands behind you?”

  Fell shook his head. He stayed at the head of the company, with the leader, as Indaro and the others were guided back to the centre. Indaro heard Fell ask, “Where are we going?”

  The leader replied, “To Old Mountain.”

  PART THREE

  The House of Glass

  Chapter 15

  The tall, crooked building loomed like a stooping heron over Blue Duck Alley. Its layers of cellars had been laid down in the unremembered past and now the deepest level was always under water. The ground floor of the house was a centuries-old squat, square stone building, its windows boarded against the prying eyes of neighbours and the thieving fingers of their children. Above that rose four storeys of crumbling bricks and mortar, each slightly smaller than the one beneath, the arched windows painted gaily in different colours. And on top, comically, apparently an afterthought, riding like the crow’s nest atop a ship’s mast, was an overlarge structure of timber and red tile, an attic, a workroom, and the heart of the house. The whole building, supported by its neighbours only to the first three floors, leaned forward vertiginously, overburdened by the weight on top. Indeed some former resident, perhaps worried by the way the house shifted ominously in the strong northerlies, had built a latticework of timber which reached out from the front wall of the workroom and grasped the pitched roof of the high lodging house on the other side of the alley. Now the two tall buildings leaned against each other comfortably, held together and apart by the sky highway. Only the pure white cats—the ghost cats—which made the quarter their home deftly trod this wooden path high above the stones of the alley.

  The dank chambers on the ground floor of the House of Glass housed the furnace, a workroom and storage space. At the rear was a small courtyard, the home of brown rats and the white cats which preyed on them. The first floor housed storage and a small kitchen, scarcely used. Above that was a parlour and study, and above that a jumble of bedrooms on two floors, also mostly unlived-in.

  The workroom at the top of the house was reached by a sturdy wooden ladder, cursed daily by those obliged to climb it. The dark-haired young woman who worked up there didn’t care. The room was bright and airy, and she loved it, and no amount of grumbling by her father, or by lame Frayling who worked for them, or by the parade of servants and housekeepers drafted in to clean the house, made any difference.

  The girl sat in the wide west window, her bare feet up on the sill, lookin
g out over the bustling City, across the jumble and tumble of roofs. Lindo was a poor quarter, bounded to the north by Burman Far and to the west by the Old Wall. Far below her was a maze of alleys and squalid streets, thousands of shanties built of richer people’s refuse. Dotted about were big dark ruined buildings, once the homes of the wealthy, now rookeries for the poorest of the poor. There were few houses as tall as the House of Glass, so her view stretched over squalid Lindo, towards far Otaro and its turrets and grey forests, to the Red Palace in the misty distance. The mist had been lying heavily on the City since the Great Flood a month before; in the early mornings it looked like the sea, grey and troubled, from which tall buildings poked like outcrops of rock.

  She turned back to the workroom and her work. The attic room was alive with light and colour. Sheets of stained glass leaned against walls and low-set windows, refracting the sunlight in a thousand sparkling patches of crimson and ochre and leaf green splashing across the plaster walls. On a big oak table in the centre lay the sections of glass for the window she was working on. It was a tall narrow panel commissioned for the home of a fat merchant in Otaro. She gazed at it critically but with pride. At the top of the panel a silver leviathan basked on sunlit waters, spume blowing from his head. At the base of the window a green-skinned giant of the deep crept across golden sand, its tentacles oozing ahead of it. Between the two monsters was a seething stew of fishes in every colour of the spectrum, framed by waving fronds of flowering plants.

  “Where did you see such coloured fish?” her father had asked, believing she had never seen the sea, nor knew anyone who had.

  She had shrugged. She had seen enough fish on the fishmonger’s stall, their scales shining in delicate shades of pink and green and brown. She imagined that they lost their colours in death, as people did, and that in life they had shimmered with the brightest colours available to the gods’ palette. So now she fashioned green fish with gold stripes, and red fish with blue heads, and herds of tiny fish in every shade of yellow she could create, each with a crest of black. The leviathan had golden teeth, the squid blue eyes. The sea itself was dappled silver, but it was lost beneath the swirling collage of movement and colour.

  The panel was nearly finished. Most of the panes of glass were laid in place on the wide central table. She had two more sections to complete, important ones near the base, which would lie at eye level on the merchant’s wall. There were the tips of the monster’s tentacles—green on yellow. And her own sign. Then, when the final panes had been baked in the kiln, fixing the paint to the glass surface, Frayling would join her to help cut and solder the lead calms which would bind the whole work into one piece.

  She walked over to the original watercolour painting of the panel, now well-worn and ragged, which she had first pinned to the wall more than half a year before. She looked at it for a while, then returned to the table of glass. She closed her eyes and relaxed her shoulders, letting her thoughts calm and settle into the creatures on the panel. She imagined the tentacles, their sinewy rubbery strength. She saw them touch the sand, then reach forward, groping.

  Then there was a step on the ladder, a stumble and an oath. She frowned a little and allowed her mind to drift back to the workroom.

  “This year, by all the cursed gods, I will have a staircase built!” Her father’s head, grey-haired and tousled, appeared in sight, and he struggled up the rest of the steps into the room.

  She smiled and raised her eyebrows at him. He saw her look and admitted, “I know, I say that every year. But next summer I’ll do it, I swear. Frayling will leave us if he has to carry many more sheets of glass up here.”

  She watched him fondly. There was no red left in his hair, and his face was heavily lined with age and sad experience. He avoided her gaze and looked down at the floor. When he spoke it was with reluctance. She guessed what he was going to say.

  “The merchant’s servant has been here. He wants you to go to his house to see the fitting of the window.”

  A wave of panic trembled across her stomach, and she shook her head. “You,” she whispered, pleading.

  “I know I can do it,” he replied gravely, “and I will go with you, but it is a matter of courtesy. This is your most important commission. He is a good client. And he is a good man. He does not deserve your disrespect.”

  There was metal in his voice she seldom heard, and her heart sank, for she knew she could not refuse him. She hated meeting people, and feared to speak to them. Many people thought she could not speak, and called her “dummy” behind her back, and sometimes to her face. The fact was that she used her words sparingly, as if she had merely a cupful which she offered to people a drop at a time. Her windows spoke for her, she believed.

  She did not need words to tell her father how she felt about visiting the merchant.

  “How long?” he asked her, glancing at the oak table.

  She held up four fingers.

  “Then I will tell him we will deliver on the last day of the month.” He walked over to the south window. Outside a sturdy pulley had been fixed to the wooden beams jutting out over the alley.

  “This is the biggest work you have ever fashioned,” he said. “It will be very heavy. I think it should be lowered down in two, maybe three, parts. And reassembled at the merchant’s house.”

  He saw the unwillingness in her face, and added, “It is very heavy, and very fragile, and it is worth half a year’s work to you. It is a long way to Otaro. If there were an accident, it would be best to lose only a third of your work, rather than all of it.”

  He was right of course, but she could not explain to him, if she even had the words, how important it was to her to finish the whole work in one piece and see it leave the House of Glass complete. The last half year had been blissful. Her heart had raced with excitement each morning as she awoke and thought of her work for the day. These last few days would be sad, for the sea window she had laboured all her skill and love on would be gone. If it were to leave this place in pieces, unfinished, it would leave an empty place in her heart.

  But, she thought, the days would be spoiled now anyway, with the prospect of meeting the fat-faced merchant, and the friends and hangers-on who would no doubt be invited to see the window put into place. They would all glance at her from the corners of their eyes and, when they thought she was not watching, speak to each other in hushed tones, smirking or sympathetic, according to their natures.

  Her father looked at her levelly, awaiting her reaction, so she forced a smile and nodded. He knew it was forced, and loved her for her bravery. And she loved him for not mentioning it.

  “Thank you, little soldier,” he said.

  Bartellus climbed back down the steps, stopping from time to time to ease his aching knee. When he and Em had first taken the house in Blue Duck Alley he had looked doubtfully at the steep stairways, and the ladder up to the workroom, but thought to himself he would seldom have reason to go there. In fact, he now spent part of each day up there with Emly. He loved to watch her work. He had always admired her grace and strength, even as a child. Now, aged just sixteen, she had added to that a skill beyond his comprehension. He saw the delicate paintings she made of her planned work, and marvelled as she turned thin paper and delicate brushwork into superb stained glass windows which delighted the eye and warmed the soul. She would take panes of plain glass fashioned by Frayling in his workroom on the ground floor, and transform them, reshaping them by nibbling away at the edges with a tool called a grozing iron, then painting them with black paint, creating faces, and muscles, and, in this panel, waving sea fronds, the spots on the monster’s tentacles, and fishy frills.

  Emly loved her work, and she loved the home where, he hoped, she had been happy for the first time in her life. But she knew, just as he did, although they had never discussed it, that they would have to move on soon. They did not lead the life of fugitives, but that was what they were.

  Bartellus slipped out of the side door and turned into Blue Duck
Alley, following its meandering length away from the Old Wall. They were in the part of the City called Lindo. It had once been a place of wealth and privilege, but that was many centuries before. Most older people called it the Armoury, because for generations the forges of the emperor’s armourers were situated there, benefiting from the brisk north wind that blew perpetually along its sloping streets. But the City grew, and the armourers and their forges were relocated farther south and east, towards the edges of the City and closer to the armies they supplied.

  Now the Armoury’s high houses of the rich, those that still stood, were grim rookeries for the elderly. In a City permanently at war, those who survived their years of armed service had nothing to look forward to in old age except a half-life crippled by injury and by the dementia that was a curse on all the aged. The rookeries housed the dregs of the City, maimed or demented old men and women, packed into verminous apartments, dozens to a room, barely living, barely alive. In his short time in the sewers they called the Halls Bartellus had never seen such squalor as dwelt in the rookeries of Lindo.

  Between the rookeries were the smoking shacks and shanties of the working poor, those who struggled to maintain a craft when materials often could not be had, and the workers in the houses of the rich in wealthy Otaro and Gervain. The jumble of huts, built of timber and tin and cardboard and debris, moved constantly, and the maze of alleys between them shifted daily. It was easy to get lost in their depths, and careful folk went nowhere near them.

  The whole quarter had been scoured clean of these patchwork homes in the devastating flood two months before. Bartellus, riding out the storm with Emly and Frayling in the House of Glass, saw them swept away and thought them gone for good. Yet within days the surviving inhabitants had returned and started rebuilding.