Upon the
Cataract
The following morning, before she left the
bartizan, Dorcas cut her hair until she almost seemed a boy, and
thrust a white peony through the circulet that confined it. I
labored over documents until afternoon, then borrowed a layman’s
jelab from the sergeant of my clavigers and went out hoping to
encounter her.
The brown book I carry says there is
nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from all
those one knows, since to do so is to explore a second and
unsuspected self. I have found a thing stranger: to explore such a
city only after one has lived in it for some time without learning
anything of it.
I did not know where the baths Dorcas
had mentioned stood, though I had surmised from talk I had heard in
court that they existed. I did not know where the bazaar where she
bought her cloth and cosmetics was located, or even if there were
more than one. I knew nothing, in short, beyond what I could see
from the embrasure, and the brief route from the Vincula to the
archon’s palace. I had, perhaps, a too-ready confidence in my own
ability to find my way about in a city so much smaller than Nessus;
even so I took the precaution of making certain from time to time,
as I trod the crooked streets that straggled down the cliff between
cave-houses excavated from the rock and swallow-houses jutting out
from it, that I could still see the familiar shape of the bartizan,
with its barricaded gate and black gonfalon.
In Nessus the rich live toward the
north where the waters of Gyoll are purer, and the poor to the
south where they are foul. Here in Thrax that custom no longer
held, both because the Acis flowed so swiftly that the excrement of
those upstream (who were, of course, but a thousandth part as
numerous as those who lived about the northern reaches of Gyoll)
hardly affected its flood, and because water taken from above the
cataract was conveyed to the public fountains and the homes of the
wealthy by aqueducts, so that no reliance had to be put upon the
river save when the largest quantities of water—as for
manufacturing or wholesale washing—were required.
Thus in Thrax the separation was by
elevation. The wealthiest lived on
the lowest slopes near the river, within easy reach of the shops
and public offices, where a brief walk brought them to piers from
which they could travel the length of the city in slave-rowed
caiques. Those somewhat less well off had their houses higher, the
middle class in general had theirs higher still, and so on until
the very poorest dwelt just below the fortifications at the cliff
tops, often in jacals of mud and reeds that could be reached only
by long ladders.
I was to see something of those
miserable hovels, but for the present I remained in the commercial
quarter near the water. There the narrow streets were so thronged
with people that I at first thought a festival was in progress, or
perhaps that the war—which had seemed so remote while I remained in
Nessus but had become progressively more immediate as Dorcas and I
journeyed north—was now near enough to fill the city with those who
fled before it.
Nessus is so extensive that it has, as
I have heard said, five buildings for each living inhabitant. In
Thrax that ratio is surely reversed, and on that day it seemed to
me at times that there must have been fifty for each roof. Too,
Nessus is a cosmopolitan city, so that although one saw many
foreigners there, and occasionally even cacogens come by ship from
other worlds, one was always conscious that they were foreigners,
far from their homes. Here the streets swarmed with diverse
humanity, but they merely reflected the diverse nature of the
mountain setting, so that when I saw, for example, a man whose hat
was made from a bird’s pelt with the wings used for ear flaps, or a
man in a shaggy coat of kaberu skin, or a man with a tattooed face,
I might see a hundred more such tribesmen around the next
corner.
These men were eclectics, the
descendants of settlers from the south who had mixed their blood
with that of the squat, dark autochthons, adopted certain of their
customs, and mingled these with still others acquired from the
amphitryons farther north and those, in some instances, of even
less-known peoples, traders and parochial races.
Many of these eclectics favor knives
that are curved—or as they are sometimes called, bent—having two
relatively straight sections, with an elbow a little toward the
point. This shape is said to make it easier to pierce the heart by
stabbing beneath the breastbone; the blades are stiffened with a
central rib, are sharpened on both sides, and are kept very sharp;
there is no guard, and their hafts are commonly of bone. (I have
described these knives in detail because they are as characteristic
of the region as anything can be said to be, and because it is from
them that Thrax takes another of its names: the City of Crooked
Knives. There is also the resemblance of the plan of the city to
the blade of such a knife, the curve of the defile corresponding to
the curve of the blade, the River Acis to the central rib, Acies
Castle to the point, and the Capulus to the line at which the steel
vanishes into the haft.)
One of the keepers of the Bear Tower
once told me that there is no animal so dangerous or so savage and
unmanageable as the hybrid resulting when a fighting dog mounts a
she-wolf. We are accustomed to think of the
beasts of the forest and mountain as wild, and to think of the men
who spring up, as it seems, from their soil as savage. But the
truth is that there is a wildness more vicious (as we would know
better if we were not so habituated to it) in certain domestic
animals, despite their understanding so much human speech and
sometimes even speaking a few words; and there is a more profound
savagery in men and women whose ancestors have lived in cities and
towns since the dawn of humanity. Vodalus, in whose veins flowed
the undefiled blood of a thousand exultants—exarchs, ethnarchs, and
starosts—was capable of violence unimaginable to the autochthons
that stalked the streets of Thrax, naked beneath their huanaco
cloaks.
Like the dog-wolves (which I never saw,
because they were too vicious to be useful), these eclectics took
all that was most cruel and ungovernable from their mixed
parentage; as friends or followers they were sullen, disloyal, and
contentious; as enemies, fierce, deceitful, and vindictive. So at
least I had heard from my subordinates at the Vincula, for
eclectics made up more than half the prisoners there.
I have never encountered men whose
language, costume, or customs are foreign without speculating on
the nature of the women of their race. There is always a
connection, since the two are the growths of a single culture, just
as the leaves of a tree, which one sees, and the fruit, which one
does not see because it is hidden by the leaves, are the growths of
a single organism. But the observer who would venture to predict
the appearance and flavor of the fruit from the outline of a few
leafy boughs seen (as it were) from a distance, must know a great
deal about leaves and fruit if he is not to make himself
ridiculous.
Warlike men may be born of languishing
women, or they may have sisters nearly as strong as themselves and
more resolute. And so I, walking among crowds composed largely of
these eclectics and the townsmen (who seemed to me not much
different from the citizens of Nessus, save that their clothing and
their manners were somewhat rougher) found myself speculating on
dark-eyed, dark-skinned women, women with glossy black hair as
thick as the tails of the skewbald mounts of their brothers, women
whose faces I imagined as strong yet delicate, women given to
ferocious resistance and swift surrender, women who could be won
but not bought—if such women exist in this world.
From their arms I traveled in
imagination to the places where they might be found, the lonely
huts crouched by mountain springs, the hide yurts standing alone in
the high pastures. Soon I was as intoxicated with the thought of
the mountains as I had been once, before Master Palaemon had told
me the correct location of Thrax, with the idea of the sea. How
glorious are they, the immovable idols of Urth, carved with
unaccountable tools in a time inconceivably ancient, still lifting
above the rim of the world grim heads crowned with mitres, tiaras,
and diadems spangled with snow, heads whose eyes are as large as
towns, figures whose shoulders are wrapped in forests.
Thus, disguised in the dull jelab of a
townsman, I elbowed my way down
streets packed with humanity and reeking with the odors of ordure
and cookery, with my imagination filled with visions of hanging
stone, and crystal streams like carcanets.
Thecla must, I think, have been taken
at least into the foothills of these heights, no doubt to escape
the heat of some particularly torrid summer; for many of the scenes
that rose in my mind (as it seemed, of their own accord) were
noticeably childlike. I saw rock-loving plants whose virginal
flowers I beheld with an immediacy of vision no adult achieves
without kneeling; abysses that seemed not only frightening but
shocking, as though their existence were an affront to the laws of
nature; peaks so high they appeared to be literally without summit,
as though the whole world had been falling forever from some
unimaginable Heaven, which yet retained its hold on these
mountains.
Eventually I reached Acies Castle,
having walked almost the entire length of the city. I made my
identity known to the postern guards there and was permitted to
enter and climb to the top of the donjon, as I had once climbed our
Matachin Tower before taking my leave of Master
Palaemon.
When I had gone there to make my
farewell to the only place I had known, I had stood at one of the
loftiest points of the Citadel, which was itself poised atop one of
the highest elevations in the whole area of Nessus. The city had
been spread before me to the limits of vision, with Gyoll traced
across it like the green slime of a slug across a map; even the
Wall had been visible on the horizon at some points, and nowhere
was I beneath the shadow of a summit much superior to my
own.
Here the impression was far different.
I bestrode the Acis, which leaped toward me down a succession of
rocky steps each twice or three times the height of a tall tree.
Beaten to a foaming whiteness that glittered in the sunlight, it
disappeared beneath me and reappeared as a ribbon of silver racing
through a city as neatly contained in its declivity as one of those
toy villages in a box that I (but it was Thecla) recalled receiving
on a birthday.
Yet I stood, as it were, at the bottom
of a bowl. On every side the walls of stone ascended, so that to
look at any one of them was to believe, for a moment at least, that
gravity had been twisted until it stood at right angles to its
proper self by some sorcerer’s multiplication with imaginary
numbers, and the height I saw was properly the level surface of the
world.
For a watch or more, I think, I stared
up at those walls, and traced the spidery lines of the waterfalls
that dashed down them in thunder and clean romance to join the
Acis, and watched the clouds trapped among them that seemed to
press softly against their unyielding sides like sheep bewildered
and dismayed among pens of stone.
Then I grew weary at last of the
magnificence of the mountains and my mountain dreams—or rather, not
weary, but dizzied by them until my head reeled with vertigo, and I
seemed to see those merciless heights even when I closed my eyes,
and felt that in my dreams, that night and for many nights, I would
fall from their precipices, or cling with bloody fingers to their
hopeless walls.
Then I turned in earnest to the city
and reassured myself with the sight of the bartizan of the Vincula,
a very modest little cube now, cemented to a cliff that was hardly
more than a ripple among the incalculable waves of stone around it.
I plotted the courses of the principal streets, seeking (as in a
game, to sober myself from my long gazing on the mountains) to
identify those I had walked in reaching the castle, and to observe
from this new perspective the buildings and market squares I had
seen on the way. By eye I looted the bazaars, finding that there
were two, one on either side of the river; and I marked afresh the
familiar landmarks I had learned to know from the embrasure of the
Vincula—the harena, the pantheon, and the archon’s palace. Then,
when everything I had seen from the ground had been confirmed from
my new vantage point, and I felt I understood the spatial
relationship of the place at which I stood to what I had known
earlier of the plan of the city, I began to explore the lesser
streets, peering along the twisted paths that climbed the upper
cliffs and probing narrow alleys that often seemed no more than
mere bands of darkness between buildings.
In seeking them out, my gaze came at
last to the margins of the river again, and I began to study the
landings there, and the storehouses, and even the pyramids of
barrels and boxes and bales that waited there to be carried aboard
some vessel. Now the water no longer foamed, save when it was
obstructed by the piers. Its color was nearly indigo, and like the
indigo shadows seen at evening on a snowy day, it seemed to slip
silently along, sinuous and freezing; but the motion of the
hurrying caiques and laden feluccas showed how much turbulence lay
concealed beneath that smooth surface, for the larger craft swung
their long bowspirits like fencers, and both yawed crabwise at
times while their oars threshed the racing eddies.
When I had exhausted all that lay
farther downstream, I leaned from the parapet to observe the
closest reach of the river and a wharf that was no more than a
hundred strides from the postern gate. Looking down at the
stevedores there who toiled to unburden one of the narrow river
boats, I saw near them, unmoving, a tiny figure with bright hair.
At first I thought her a child because she seemed so small beside
the burly, nearly naked laborers; but it was Dorcas, sitting at the
very edge of the water with her face in her hands.