The City

by Stella Gemmell

  “Bartellus!” his assistant said, looking up and seeing him. “This is a fine day!”

  Carvelho was a former infantryman of the Maritime, invalided out ten years before. He was in his forties, lean and muscular, and looked more like a street fighter than an academic, until you noticed one arm had been amputated above the elbow. He relied on the small fee Bartellus paid him to supplement his army pension and keep a wife and three children somewhere in the Library quarter. Carvelho was enthusiastic about his work, and if he guessed that the old man’s main interest was not what he pretended, then he never let on.

  “How so?”

  “I have come across a reference in this”—Carvelho waved a manuscript Bartellus knew to be the working journal of a courtier in the far eastern Dravidian empire two thousand years before—“to the third Dravidian emperor…”

  “Argipelus.”

  “Yes, Argipelus, writing a letter to Mohastidies…”

  An early emperor of the City, Bartellus remembered, frowning with the effort.

  “Asking for green marble for his palace.” He grinned his lopsided grin, and Bartellus smiled in response. Carvelho believed his own ancestors originally travelled from the outskirts of the Dravidian empire far across the Little Sea. He was fascinated with the history of the civilisation and delighted when he discovered any long-ago link with the City. “If we could find that letter—what a breakthrough that would be!”

  “Indeed.” Bartellus sat down at the table. “Now, I have narrowed down some subjects for you.” These were his invariable words. He handed Carvelho a piece of paper. The younger man looked at it and nodded and set off happily towards the huge central stack of drawers, protected by tarpaulins, where lay the thousands of catalogues of books, their subjects and location. Eventually, before the end of the day, he would come back with a list of twenty or thirty books, and between them they would winnow them down to a dozen or so to order from the custodians. They would arrive in the wheeled carts the next day. This work would take Carvelho most of the afternoon, leaving Bartellus to study in privacy the volumes already heaped in front of him. Six out of seven of those books were of no interest to the old man; they were merely a diversion to disguise from Carvelho, and from anyone who showed more than a passing interest, Bartellus’ real pursuit.

  When he and Em had emerged from the dark of the sewers eight years before he had not guessed he would ever think again of the Halls and their wretched Dwellers. Yet the words of the long-dead Ysold pursued him. The woman, in the last hour of her life, had told him the Eating Gate was breaking down, that it was no longer repaired, and that eventually the entire City would flood as a result. Bartellus wondered, despite himself, why a job, once deemed important enough to justify teams of engineers descending regularly into the peril of the deeper Halls, had been abandoned. He had been a bureaucrat himself, of sorts, and he knew it was probably just an oversight, a lost piece of paper, or a few thousand talents saved on someone’s budget.

  Yet, without occupation one day, he had wandered into the Great Library to see if he could find any reference to the Gate—and had become hopelessly trapped. After a few months of floundering in the enticing pathways of history, he had found the journal of an engineer called Miletos, an engaging character, whose humour and intellect shone out from the dusty parchment and faded inks. The man never mentioned the Eating Gate—indeed, after nearly eight years, Bartellus had yet to find the official name of the structure—but his musings on the architecture of the long-ago City, and his knife-sharp comments on the personalities of his day, fired Bartellus’ imagination for the first time in decades. Indeed, Miletos’ journal was the only work the old soldier had ever stolen from the library. He had spirited it past the beady eyes of the crones who watched the exits, split into three parts and tied round his stomach. That was six years before and he still felt guilty about it.

  Since then he had been drawn as deeply into a study of the City’s architecture as he had once been lost in the Halls themselves. It was almost impossible to link the murky tunnels, caverns and bridges he had encountered in his brief sojourn in the Halls with the dry descriptions by dry-as-dust engineers of triple-bore drains, intercepting sewers, catchpits and overflow weirs. It was a maze, perhaps a hopeless one, but Bartellus loved the challenge, and he revelled in the work.

  Then one winter’s day a green-clad custodian had lingered at his table, the clicking wheels of his laden cart slowing then falling silent. The man, small and thin-featured with red hair and a humped shoulder, asked him genially about his interests, commenting on the pile of volumes stacked around Bartellus, all on the subjects of engineering, architecture and the history of the City’s construction. The custodian had questioned him keenly, his bright pale eyes fixed on him with a scholarly fervour. Bartellus, appalled at the thought he was being watched, abandoned his studies at the library that very day, and it was more than half a year before he ventured there again. Then he started to conceal his real interest in a welter of other subjects. And he employed Carvelho as his proxy. He saw the red-headed custodian from time to time, but the little man seemed to have forgotten him.

  With a sigh of contentment Bartellus pulled a familiar volume towards him, bound in cracked leather, entitled The First Life of Marshall Creed. In his younger days Creed was a ship owner from the isle of Iastos, a trader in obsidian and mother-of-pearl and something of a rogue and a chancer. He had fallen on hard times after a hurricane wrecked half his ships, and he fetched up, after many escapades, most of which Bartellus considered pure fantasy, resident in Otaro. In those days, more than four hundred years before, the City was open to all foreigners, and it was a central hub of commerce, its port thronged with ships of all nations. Creed, with his long-suffering wife and five daughters, rented a house from which he conducted a variety of businesses on the farthest fringes of legality.

  It was the last three chapters of his Life which interested Bartellus. Creed was an old man by then, and the autobiography took on a melancholy tone. The author abandoned the boastfulness and arrogance of the previous pages, and spoke instead like a man with a last mission before the end, which he could see coming with sad clarity. He took to wandering the City, marvelling at its beauty and cruelty. He spoke with awe of the Rainbow Gardens, which in those days spread out from the palace in great arcs more than ten leagues long, each planted with flowers in just one colour of the spectrum. He talked with mathematicians and astronomers, who explained to the old man the complex formulae used to build the twenty-seven crystal towers of the Red Palace through which the sun would shine in succession on midsummer’s morn. He described the glass birdhouses on the Shield, where the brightest birds from all over the world were brought to breed and flourish, to be released over the rooftops, filling the sky with colour on feast days and to honour the gods. He wrote of the Cages, metal prisons in which the most despised criminals, men and women, were hauled up the outside of the City’s walls, some of them already half dead from torture, some fit and still struggling, to die a lingering and hideous death from shock and thirst as an entertainment for all to watch.

  And he described, in the finicky detail of an old man who can no longer judge the attention span of his readers, a trip down into the sewers beneath the palace, to the Dark Water, the name he gave to the great river Menander as it dove beneath the City, and to the Magisterium Gate, a construction intended to break up and pulverise large objects which found their way into the high sewers before they could cause obstruction farther down in the narrower tunnels.

  The Magisterium Gate was not the Eating Gate, of that Bartellus was sure, for it had only sixteen “rotating engines,” as Creed described them, whereas Bartellus was certain the Eating Gate had twenty barrels—nineteen when he last had sight of it. But the mechanism appeared the same, and Creed joined a party of engineers who went down to the Gate to maintain it one day in midsummer when water levels were low and dangers at a minimum. The author spoke of the long walk down through leagues of sti
nking tunnels, the ghostly inhabitants who disappeared into darkness whenever anyone approached them, and one curious incident.

  After a detailed description of the Gate, the party made its way back up towards the light. Not a moment too soon for the old man. He wrote: “Woefully I trudged, my spirits cloaked in darkness as my boots were encrusted with ordure. I felt I would never be liberated from this mournful place although, indeed, I had been in its depths for not half a day. My young companions laughed and shouted and joked, but their sounds of desperate cheer echoed hollowly from the dripping walls. Our return journey was painfully longer than the outward walk for, I was informed, unforecast rainfall in the distant world outside rendered that way impassable. I admit to a stomach full of terrors at the news. I can imagine no more frightful place to be lost than in the bowels of those awful eternal tunnels.

  “Poor old man that I am, I found myself lagging behind the strong youngsters who were my companions. Too proud, old fool, to cry out to them to wait for me, I struggled on, falling farther and farther behind. Their torches began to fade out of sight and only then did I cast aside self-conceit and call to them, but by then it was too late and they did not hear me.

  “As I was fearing I had been lost to the darkness, my legs weakening with fear and fatigue, the welcome light of a torch flickered on the far side of the stream I was following. I turned with relief towards it, for I thought one of my companions had returned for me, unaccountably taking the wrong side of the water. But I was astonished beyond words to see it was a woman, holding aloft the flame and watching me with calm interest.”

  Bartellus shifted in his hard seat, leaning forward to peer at this intently.

  “She raised the torch higher, and I could see she was garbed in long pale robes, hooded, like an angel or a spirit of the Domanii. Then my senses reasserted themselves, and I realised she was but a real woman, for her robes had been snipped off immodestly above the ankle bones and her feet were clad in strong thick-soled boots, sensible footwear for a walking in the drear sewers. She threw back her hood and I saw she was not young, yet not old. Her hair was the silver of moonlight and her face that of a stern angel.

  “I roused myself to call out to her for aid, but a cry from farther down the tunnel indicated my companions had registered my loss. I saw their torches hurriedly making their way back to rescue me, and the woman faded away into the darkness.”

  He and the sewer workers carried on climbing more slowly, and Creed, diligent still despite his fear, described the many tunnels they travelled through.

  “It seemed like a lifetime before we saw the happy sight of daylight filtering through ornate metal grilles above our heads. Within an hour I was back in the bosom of my family, and I spent many days recovering from my ordeal. Indeed, for weeks afterwards the coming of night would put me in an anxious torment, for I feared the walls were closing in and I slept with a night light in my chamber for a season.”

  But come the autumn of that year he had recovered his spirits enough to meet one of the workers who had accompanied him on his underground journey. The man, dour and grizzled, had been working in the sewers for the emperor for more than a decade.

  “‘You should have told us, sir,’” said the man solemnly when I had finished my strange story. ‘The gullible call them wraiths, but I believe they are enemies of the City, burrowing up through the drains.’

  “I thought about the tall, graceful figure I had seen. The good man’s theory that this was an enemy tunneler seemed unlikely but I had no wish to offend him. So I said, ‘Wraiths? Do the gullible say why these spirits inhabit the depths?’

  “The older man looked away. ‘It is not known,’ he answered curtly, ‘if they live there or descend there to seek their victims. Some say they live there in an enchanted place called the Hall of Watchers.’

  “‘Enchanted?’ I could not help smiling as I repeated this unlikely word. ‘Are they wraiths or witches?’”

  But the man did not answer him and Creed, after questioning others of the sewer workers, dismissed this talk of the Hall of Watchers as a myth similar to so many others, such as the spirits of dead children which inhabited the palaces of the Shield, or the angels said to descend on battlefields to suck out the souls of dying soldiers. By the time of his death, he came to dismiss his own vision as phantasmagoria conjured by a mind disordered by exhaustion and the fumes of the sewer.

  Bartellus sat back. He had read these passages a dozen times, infuriated by the lack of information. He stared at the pages in frustration, hoping meaning would drift off them if he glared at them for long enough.

  The Hall of Watchers was the only link with the world he knew. He often thought about the warrior Indaro. He cursed himself for paying so little attention to his surroundings at the time and retaining so little memory subsequently. He remembered the torch-filled hall with its carvings of birds, the small quiet white room where he had supped in strange companionship with the old woman. It had all seemed like a dream, a brief respite for his mind from the hellish endurance of his life. He and Emly had not spoken of those times for some years, and when he had last questioned her, the girl’s memory of the events was murky.

  As he sat, musing on the past, Carvelho returned. He pushed Bartellus’ piece of paper back across the table to him, and added his own list of books. He was smiling.

  “I remembered what you said some time ago,” the man told Bart eagerly. “About your interest in military tattoos. You told me not to trouble myself with them at the time, but I saw this volume.”

  He hefted a large tome and read, “Cryptic Codes: Formal and Informal Insignia among Armed Men. It is by a soldier called Anabathic Marcellus.”

  Bart shrugged, trying to show lack of interest, though he was caught between apprehension and curiosity. He frowned and told his friend, “It was a whim, that’s all. I do not want to read it. Return it with these.” He had piled up books to return to the custodians. Carvelho looked disappointed and turned away, back to his work.

  But in a moment of weakness Bartellus ran his hand over the embossed cover. Despite himself, he slid it over to him and smelled the odour of rich leather. Sighing, he turned the heavy pages with their shiny plates. An expensive book, he guessed. He closed it and looked at the cover again. “Anabathic,” he thought, “one who marches uphill.” He wondered who hid under that pen name. There were many Marcelluses. Marcellus Vincerus, First Lord of the City, was writer and historian. Did he call himself Anabathic for the purposes of publishing this obscure book?

  The shiny pages slid pleasingly under his fingers as he leafed through them. The bright colours of the pictures leaped out at him: running horses, rampant lions, tigers at bay, soaring eagles and slithering serpents rioting across the pages. As he had said to Dol Salida and Creggan, the soldiery favoured animals of pride and power.

  As he looked through the book memories, warm and comforting, rose from the pages, not of blood and death and pain, but the companionship of other warriors, the certainty of shared goals and shared enemies, the sure knowledge of respect and continuity and friendship.

  And, inevitably, he thought of Fell, his friend and most loyal aide. And for the first time since his imprisonment doorways started opening in his mind, one after another swinging smoothly on their hinges, revealing worlds of colour and change, and pain. He remembered Fell by his side as they galloped their horses towards the first line of infantry in the victorious Battle of Black Creek. He saw him years later, laughing with his comrades of the 19th Imperial, as they drank yet another inn dry in the long summer of ’47.

  Then old Bart walked through a darker, older, door and saw again Fell’s trial before the emperor, anonymous faces, for so long the blank straw dolls of the quintain, resolving themselves into flesh and blood men—the Vincerii of course, and Flavius Randell Kerr, the old goat, and tall Boaz. All watching with interest and calculation and without one hint of compassion.

  And, standing before them all, the woman who had appeared in hi
s life in the darkest of days. Archange.

  It was coming up to sunset, and the library was closing its doors, when Bartellus slipped out into the lengthening shadows. He set off towards Gervain and the attic of the whore Callista, his greatcoat wrapped around him against the cool summer night.

  The two boys levered themselves up gratefully from the lee of a low wall and trotted down an alley beside the building, where a crooked red-haired man met them at a side door. He thrust a piece of paper into the bigger boy’s hand before stepping back through the high narrow doorway.

  In the darkness the younger brother yawned. The hour was getting late and the day was cooling fast. But there was still a task to do. Before they reached the comfort of home and their mother’s cooking, they first had to visit their paymaster.

  Emly raised her head and untied the frayed piece of string at her neck. She pulled back stray strands of dark hair that had fallen over her face and retied the string. Then she bent again to the last piece of the panel. By tradition, the paint on stained glass was black, to complement and contrast with the clear colours of the glass. But Emly’s signature, the mark which was her own and which was becoming recognised in the homes of the wealthy, was the one spot of coloured paint to adorn the window.

  She took a narrow brush and dipped it into a pot the colour of damp earth. In the bottom right-hand corner of a piece of clear glass she deftly sketched the shape of a gulon. Then with tiny brush and black paint she highlighted its foxy tail, wrapped around its body, and its sharp pricked ears. She stood and went to a corner cupboard and took out a small precious pot of gold paint, made specially for her by a friendly goldsmith in the Avenue of Mercy. With it she drew in two golden eyes. The gulon looked out at her from the glass, and immediately she felt the hostility of its stare.