The City

by Stella Gemmell

  There were three large wardrobe rooms, one for day dresses, one for evening gowns and one for cloaks and shawls. Shoes and gloves, muffs and hats were in a fourth room filled with cupboards and shelves and drawers. Only Petalina’s linen and her silk day gowns were close to hand.

  At last Amita found a flimsy cotton dress striped in blue and green and, hoping it was the right one, draped it with a linen cover and carried it round to the front of the building, holding it high above the ground. When she let herself into the vestibule she heard the deep tones of a man’s voice coming from Petalina’s parlour. She hesitated. Should she take the dress into the bedroom? If the door from bedroom to parlour was open she would see and be seen. She had been taught that personal servants were blind and deaf to the activities of their employers, and invisible to their eyes. Biting her lip, she pushed through the door into the bedroom. She crossed the pink-and-cream-painted room and, her back to the parlour door, hung the dress up, taking off the cover then brushing it down lightly with her palm.

  “Amita!” Petalina’s voice was commanding, and Amita went through obediently to the parlour. A lean weather-beaten man with a bald brown head and a wide white moustache was leaning on a stick by the open window. He was watching his hostess, who was dressed only in flimsy silk, and he no more than glanced at Amita.

  “You may go now,” Petalina told her crisply. “Attend me an hour before sunset. In the meantime, go to Assaios and ask her to fit you for three new shifts. Do you know where to eat?”

  Amita nodded, and Petalina dismissed her with a flick of her perfumed fingers. The girl left the room and quietly closed the door behind her. Then she paused and listened. The voices were soft but clear in the still afternoon.

  The visitor said, “He returns from the east tomorrow. I needed to speak to you first.”

  Petalina’s voice was more serious than Amita had heard before. She told the man, “He sent me a message to tell me he would be here with the dawn. I wasn’t expecting to see him again before winter.”

  “Why is he here?”

  “Some sort of crisis.” Petalina’s voice was careless. “Something lost. Or something found. There’s always something. But you should not come here in daylight, Dol Salida. You’re too easily recognised. What happened to our midnight tryst?”

  The man grunted. “To be seen coming to your rooms at night is too perilous. Marcellus would have me killed. My presence here in daylight can have an innocent explanation.”

  Petalina laughed. “There are no innocent explanations in this palace,” she told him.

  Then they lowered their voices, or moved farther into the apartments, for Amita could hear no more.

  Amita, daydreaming, gazed at herself in the sheet of polished tin decorating the main door of Petalina’s rooms. She knew she was not pretty. She had been told so often enough as a child. Her best point was her shining fair hair and usually she hid behind its curtain. Now, though, the hair was pulled back out of sight under a modest grey scarf, and her dark brows dominated her thin bony face with its anxious eyes.

  She was twelve when she and Elija fled the City. She was now twenty, and Elija eighteen. And Emly would be sixteen. She always included Emly in any thoughts about herself and Elija, because Elija always did, and because she knew that if his sister still lived Elija would discover her one day and then she, Amita, would have to leave him. In her mind pictures she imagined Emly looking like her brother, dark and sparrow-boned, with kind eyes and a sweet smile. She wondered where he was, and a trickle of fear ran through her.

  After several weeks on board ship Amita and Elija had been taken to a distant island, a place of green hills and grey sandy beaches, where they were housed with the family of a ship owner. They were still frightened then, for everything in their lives in the City had taught them to be frightened. The ship owner’s wife instructed them in the language of the island’s people, and she showed them how to read, and for a while they even went to a school there. They were happy days.

  Then one day a ship had come for them. They feared they were to be returned to the City and they said a sad farewell to the kind wife and the islands. But they were taken across the sea again, then by land for many days to a small farming community. There they met the man called Gil who was to be their guide and mentor. And there they were set to learning the arcane and difficult script of the old City, a language long ago abandoned except in some imperial documents.

  Amita left Petalina’s rooms and turned left down a long corridor which led deeper into the palace. After a few wrong turnings she found Assaios, the grim-faced housekeeper of the south wing, and tried to be patient while the woman slowly and methodically had her measured for clothes more suitable to a palace servant, then lectured her on her duties. She had already been told by Petalina that she need pay no attention to this old woman, but Amita saw no reason to make enemies and she stood with head lowered submissively as Assaios told her where she was forbidden to go, how not to address her betters, not to look at anyone even if they addressed her, and about the restrictions on water, food and fuel, where and what she could not eat, and about her clothes, her manners and her status, which was non-existent.

  Amita spent the time deciding what to do with the unexpected gift of an afternoon’s liberty. With only thirty days to go before the Day of Summoning she needed to know her way round this wing of the palace and to find a route to the Library of Silence, as she had been ordered. She had studied meagre plans of the palace before she was brought here, but she could not recognise much of what she saw. Those maps dated from when this wing was the women’s quarters of the palace, more than a hundred years before. Now it housed sets of apartments for guests of the emperor and the other lords and their friends. Much of it was empty for much of the time. But, still, it was guarded, she had seen armed men in the corridors, and to wander round haphazardly during daylight hours would call attention to her.

  So, reluctantly released by Assaios, she decided to make her way back to Petalina’s rooms, making a mental note of all side corridors, staircases up and down and doorways she saw on her way. She would memorise them, for she had an excellent memory, then investigate them one at a time as the days passed. If it came to it, she could always ask where the Library of Silence was, but she would only do that as a last resort. It had been drummed into her over and over that she must not be noticed.

  “Girl!”

  She had reached the long corridor leading back to her employer’s rooms, and was lingering beside a staircase decorated with gilt carvings of fruit and flowers which curled upwards into the light and downwards into darkness. She started nervously, glanced at the man who had called her, then dropped her head. It was the man with the moustache who had been visiting Petalina. Her heartbeat quickened.

  “Sir?”

  He limped over to her, leaning on his stick.

  “You are the Lady Petalina’s new girl?”

  “Yes, sir,” she mumbled, staring at her feet.

  “Where were you employed before?”

  “At the palace of the general Kerr, sir.”

  “Who brought you here?”

  She glanced up quickly. His keen, deep-set eyes probed her face and she looked away, trying to show fear, which was not difficult, and bafflement.

  “I don’t know, sir. A servant, sir.”

  The man said nothing for a moment. Then, “What is your name?”

  “Amita, sir.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen, sir.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Sir?”

  “Where were you born?”

  They had prepared her for this. “In Gervain, sir.”

  “Who are your parents?”

  “My father was a soldier, sir.”

  “In one of the Kerr regiments?”

  She stared at him, etching confusion across her face. “I don’t know, sir,” she wailed, then she added tearfully, “I’m a good girl, sir.” The man’s face, which had b
een friendly, became tight with annoyance at her tears, and he grunted, “Get along, girl.”

  She ducked her head and scurried off.

  Dol Salida had learned the game of urquat in an Odrysian prison camp east of the Fkeni city of Palim. Looking at himself now, old and bald and with a game leg, it was hard to believe he was once a reckless young cavalryman, as all cavalrymen must be if they are to face the eastern tribes, particularly the Fkeni, whose subtle and creative ways with execution are the stuff of nightmare. He was lucky to be captured by the small band of Odrysians in the fight, although after four years in their camp he would have argued with the word lucky. But he was released, in a rare exchange of prisoners with the City, with all his limbs and his genitals intact and he thanked the Gods of Ice and Fire for that.

  He had learned patience in those four years, a hard lesson for a young rider whose opiate was speed and self-believed invulnerability. And he had learned the art of urquat, for art he considered it, requiring as it does a fusion of memory, focus, luck and cunning. An urquat set comprises one hundred and twenty two-sided counters with fifty-six different symbols on them. Sets of urquat counters were manufactured in various colours, to make memorising them even more of a feat. In his friendly games at the Shining Stars Inn with Creggan and Bart they always used the same set, in red, blue and white. But for the Blue Moon Challenge, in which Dol Salida played annually, a new set of different-coloured counters was opened for each game. It was a challenge which had once attracted more than a hundred masters from lands near and far. Now it was played out each year among the dozen or so who still lived in the City and it was a lacklustre affair, which Dol nevertheless attended without fail.

  As the prison had taught him patience and urquat, so, in its turn, the game had taught Dol focus. And those two qualities, patience and focus, practised now over many decades, had contrived to create the foremost qualification for his present assignment—vigilance.

  He was especially vigilant when he saw a new face. He had a prodigious memory for faces and names and had never before seen this whey-faced maid Amita. Which in itself was suspicious. He limped the streets of the City each day, watching faces, particularly those of girls of an age to be in the army. This was his official employment, the one the City paid him to do. And he had attended the Kerr palace on occasions, as part of the work the City didn’t pay him for and knew nothing of. But he had never seen this bony face before. Hardly remarkable, for there must be hundreds of girls hidden away in laundries and taverns, brothels and barns, working in fields and factories, who rarely saw the light of day. Yet his vigilance was heightened in matters concerning Petalina.

  He had known the woman, and her younger sister Fiorentina, since they were maidens in their father’s home and he was a distant cousin of some sort. He had ridden away to serve the City when they were mere children and beneath his interest, but he had noticed them with painful clarity when he returned to his home some years later, on the death of his father. Petalina had always assured Dol he was the one to receive the precious flower of her virginity. He had never believed it, and he was amused when that fragile bloom proved robust enough for a second blossoming when Petalina met Marcellus. In the decades that followed Dol Salida had always stayed in touch with her. She was his first love, and when her association with Marcellus eventually proved valuable to him, well, all the better.

  He smiled to himself. The young cavalryman he once was would have sneered at the maxim “You can never be too careful.” But these were the words the older man lived by and they had kept him safe in an increasingly unsafe City.

  He was making his slow way towards the administration offices of the Red Palace in the west wing of the new building. It was his excuse for being there. He would raise the matter of Petalina’s new maid with Dashoul, who was responsible for many mountains of paperwork in the name of security. He would ensure this girl was investigated and questioned.

  Dol had five daughters himself. Three had died in the war, for they were blessed with his recklessness although not his luck. The other two had survived, and he now had eight grandchildren, two of whom were, in their turn, fighting for their City. Each night at his unremarkable home adjoining the palace precincts he prayed to the gods to deliver the pair from evil and bring them safe home. He had never been tempted to use his influence, his many contacts, to steer the youngsters in his family away from the worst of the fighting, despite the frequent tearful nagging of his wife, Gerta. He despised those who spoke in support of the City but subverted it by bending its rules for their own purposes.

  So he was disappointed, but not surprised, when he noticed that the daughter of his urquat partner Bartellus was not growing any older. Three years before, when Dol and the old soldier had first met, the girl was fourteen, but now she was only fifteen. He was not crass enough to question Bart about it. He had primed Creggan, musing about the girl when the two were alone at the urquat table, waiting for Bart to appear. Once Bartellus arrived Dol changed the subject, knowing that eventually Creggan who, once faced with an unanswered question, hung on to it like a flea on a dog, would eventually come round to asking.

  Dol Salida then approached the dogged Dashoul, not to inform him of Emly’s status, but to enquire about Old Bart himself. He discovered Bartellus was a man of the City, born and bred in Gervain, who had served his emperor loyally over two decades in the 14th Imperial and later the infantry company they called Ballatye’s End. He had been invalided out fifteen years before at the rank of sergeant, had dropped off the map for a while, then reappeared living in Lindo with the daughter. All this Dashoul could validate. Except that the Bartellus in his records had three sons, all now dead serving their City. And not a daughter in sight.

  Dol kept the discrepancy to himself, for it could be a stumble by the City’s bureaucracy, as the name Bartellus was scarcely unusual, and he had decided to set a man to following Bart when he heard the old man had been knifed in an attack on his home. The House of Glass had been destroyed by fire, along with the neighbouring houses. Bartellus was gravely wounded, but he survived and was nursed back to health by the alleged daughter. Dol Salida was not a cruel man, and he had better things to do than press an injured old man’s only daughter into the army. There would be plenty of time when he was back on his feet again.

  But then the old man, whoever he was, disappeared, the girl with him. This had piqued Dol’s interest further and he had set out with renewed vigour to find out who the old soldier was, and what had become of him.

  Dol had wandered by the gutted house in Blue Duck Alley, had idly chatted with its neighbours, bought ale in local inns, and quietly met some of his army of informants. He found out little he did not already know. The House of Glass had been torched certainly, perhaps by assailants unknown, perhaps by Old Bart himself, they said. But the man had been stabbed, and had been rescued from the burning building by his daughter and a heroic passer-by who had carried him across the wooden bridge which joined the attics of the glassmaker’s house to those of the lodging house opposite. Afterwards the old man and his daughter, the passing hero, and the woman and two children living in the top floor of the lodging house had all disappeared into the teeming City.

  Dol had exerted all his considerable charm on the lodging house owner, to no avail. The woman, Meggy, thin and tired and frightened by anyone asking questions, however charming, had made it her business not to know anything of the business of others. She sat on the front step of her building, feeding noxious scraps to a smelly dog, and refused to discuss any of her residents or even look Dol in the face. She could tell him nothing about Bartellus or Emly, except their names, and knew less about the mysterious rescuer.

  Dol had thanked her extravagantly for her non-existent help and turned to set off on the long walk back to Burman Far. As he did so he caught the eye of a thin, dirty child who scuttled away from him round a corner, then peered back around it, eyeing him calculatingly. He limped over to the boy, who skittered away down the street
, pausing at the next corner. Dol had not the time or energy for this game, so he slipped a silver double-pente into his palm and flashed it at the urchin. The boy gestured for Dol to follow, and ran down a side-alley. Sighing, Dol followed, taking out the curved knife he always wore at his side.

  The boy led him to the rear of a stable, where bales of hay were guarded by a fat man who lay against one, snoring loudly.

  The urchin sneered, “Don’t need that pig-sticker,” nodding at the knife in Dol’s hand.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Dol replied gruffly.

  The child rubbed his grubby nose with a grubbier hand. “I saw it,” he said proudly. “I saw the fire.”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know and this coin is yours,” Dol told him, pocketing the double-pente and resting his rear against a bale of hay.

  “I dunno what you know,” the boy said sullenly.

  He had a point. Dol shrugged. “Try me.”

  “I saw it go on fire. There was flames all up it…”

  “Do you know Old Bart and Emly?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Do you know where they are now?”

  “They went to the ’firmary.”

  This was not true. The infirmaries were the first places Dol checked. He heaved himself back up on his feet.

  The boy said hastily, “I dunno where they gone now. But I seen the soldier.”

  “What soldier?”

  “Soldier what climbed up the bridge.”

  “The man who rescued them?” All he had heard was that the man was tall and blond.