Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1

by Daniel Polansky

Bulan laughed, easily and without affect. ‘And what is he like, the Aubade?’

  Calla took a long time to form a response, not because she needed it but because she was conscious of Bulan’s eyes on her, and of how fine she looked in profile, while gazing out into the distance. ‘He’s the most extraordinary being in all of creation,’ she said, the definitive word on the subject.

  Bulan brushed his hand lightly against hers. ‘If I were a less polite man, I might be inclined to argue that point.’

  Calla felt a blush form on her cheeks, smiled along with the bloom. ‘And what is it you do, Bulan whose father was no very great poet?’

  ‘I buy things cheaply and sell them dearly.’

  ‘A lucrative industry.’

  ‘There is quite a bit of competition, I am afraid.’

  ‘Then you have recently arrived in the Roost?’

  ‘I’ve been here since late summer, looking after various interests.’ Amongst many other things, the Roost was the largest and richest trading port in all the world. Foreigners from across the seas came to trade at the Perennial Exchange on the Third Rung, which sold what scraps the Eldest were willing to part with, as well as acting as a clearing-house for the goods and products of the rest of the continent.

  ‘The crafts of the Roost are second to none,’ Calla said, as if this were a well-known fact.

  Bulan shrugged. ‘The clockwork mechanisms of the Eternal are indeed very fine,’ he said. ‘And their arms, though of course those are not sold. Apart from that?’ He shrugged. ‘The cloth is better in Dycia, the fruit better in the Baleferic Isles, and the slaves better in Partha.’

  ‘I’m sorry you seem to find our city less than satisfying.’

  ‘Bulan is never satisfied,’ he said, brushing aside her censure. ‘Though he might almost feel so, here atop the city, surrounded by such … beauty.’ The First Rung was reserved for the Eternal and those who served them directly. Even the most lavishly prosperous merchant prince or highest-ranking custodian was forbidden to own property on the crest. For a foreigner to purchase the right to visit cost a small fortune, and the bracelet on his wrist suggested Bulan was being less than ingenuous about his wealth. ‘Beautiful, and very curious.’

  ‘And what is it that you find so peculiar?’

  Bulan made a gesture with his hands that seemed to encompass everything in view, opened his mouth to speak but was driven back to silence by the arrival of the hour of the Eagle, announced by the many steamwork chronographs set about the First Rung.

  Bulan waited for the chimes to end before continuing. ‘To begin with, Bulan has travelled the length of the world, from Old Dycia to distant Partha. And for all the differences in those lands, in custom, clothing, cuisine – time, at least, has remained constant. Here alone I find myself at a loss.’

  ‘Those Above divide the day into eight hours, starting at dawn – Lark, Starling, Eagle, Kite, Woodcock, Nightjar, Owl and Crake. We have just begun the hour of the Eagle, when the sun stands at its zenith and looks down upon the Roost with pleasure.’

  ‘A discerning creature, the sun. Tell me also, Calla of the Red Keep, of the curious reverence the Eternal hold for all things avian? Truly, there seems nothing in this city not named after some winged creature or other.’

  ‘Not reverence, sir,’ Calla said, pursing her lips. ‘Those Above feel kinship with the birds, appreciate their beauty and cruelty – but they worship nothing but themselves, and the world they have built.’

  ‘And yet, I had the impression that today was a feast day. What is it exactly that we are celebrating?’

  ‘Today is the anniversary of the Founding of the Roost. When the first drop of water flowed up from the Bay of Eirann and spouted from the Source, and Those Above renounced their wandering, and pledged to build a city that would be the envy of the world.’

  ‘They were not unsuccessful.’

  ‘It is also the day when the humans of the surrounding lands swore their allegiance to the Roost, entered into eternal fealty to Those Above.’

  ‘This is why Bulan always reads a contract twice.’

  ‘Here in the Roost,’ Calla said, ‘we hardly suppose ourselves to have got the worst end of the deal.’

  ‘Perhaps not everywhere in the Roost,’ Bulan said, but he said it quietly and while signalling for another glass of wine for himself. ‘When was this exactly?’

  Calla shrugged. ‘Impossible to say. The High do not keep track of time in quite the way we do.’

  ‘And the humans of the Roost? Do they not count the years, like other peoples?’

  ‘The humans of the Roost take after their masters, in this regard.’

  ‘It seems a strange way of doing things,’ Bulan said.

  ‘But then, we are not in your country,’ Calla said, taking a sip of wine to disguise the faint curl of displeasure.

  ‘True,’ Bulan acknowledged. ‘In Chazar, the women are not half so pretty.’

  ‘Sad for Chazar.’

  ‘Depends on how one views it. The paucity of our females drives our men from their homeland, forces them across the length and breadth of the world. If, growing up, my neighbour’s daughter had been slender-waisted and dark-haired, rather than thick-thighed and lightly bearded, who knows but that I would have become a greengrocer? Sold fruit in the afternoons, gone home at night and worked on expanding the line of Busir.’

  ‘Not such a terrible life, as you’ve described it.’

  ‘But one inappropriate for a man such as Bulan. His path was meant to be a rocky one, the climb steep, the summit unparallelled.’

  ‘And will Bulan’s ambitions be satisfied?’

  The bar girl came by with another glass of wine, but Bulan ignored it, his eyes firmly on Calla’s. ‘He very much hopes so.’

  Calla laughed the laugh that she gave when she wanted to look pretty rather than express levity, but beneath it was happiness, real and unfeigned. And who would not be happy on such a day, and in such a place as the Roost?

  11

  Down at the Barrow the women had been cooking since before dawn. Big copper pots of red beans and ladies fingers simmered on stoves, freshly baked loaves of quick bread cooled on window ledges. In tenement apartments mothers and sisters and young daughters sat spooning spices into bubbling cauldrons of tripe stew, or battering oysters in cornmeal, or just laughing and gossiping. The younger children tried on their costumes, adding final dashes of colour to their ensemble, tried to convince their mothers to give them a lick from the sweet spoon, enjoyed the thick atmosphere of revelry even if they couldn’t quite understand it.

  The women had been cooking since daylight, and the men had started drinking not long after, lounging on the pipes and on white cobblestone stairs and on the edges of the canals and in the streets themselves, because why not? The boulevards would see no business today, no commerce whether honest or illicit. Anyone passing would be infected by the mood, grab on to one of the little kernels of celebration, drink a shot of apple liquor and laugh with a stranger. Today was the Anamnesis, and everywhere on the Fifth, from the boundaries to the docks, it seemed there was no soul unaffected by the spirit of the holiday.

  Almost none. Thistle sat on the roof of his building, dangled his feet over the crowds milling below, thought seriously of dropping a stone. His hopes of sleeping until evening, or at least through the festivities, had been dashed by the crowds of people slipping molasses-slow down to the docks, but he still nurtured a vague hope of staying above the flood.

  Hopes dashed by the footsteps he heard coming up the stairwell. He didn’t bother to turn and see who was making them. Probably it was a sibling come to bother him about something, in which case he didn’t see the point in making their job any easier.

  And sure enough, the voice that interrupted him was as familiar and grating as a rash. ‘You up here, Thistle?’

  ‘You can see I am,’ he said, turning to face the interloper. Shrub was seven, freckled and dark-haired, a girl, though so spindly you’d ha
ve to strip her to be certain. Thistle saw her constantly and thought about her near to never. She was part of the scenery, like the drip-drip-drip of the slurp, something that there was no point in feeling any way about since it wasn’t going anywhere. In honour of the day she was wearing a worn brown frock, and her braids had been pleated with bright-coloured beads. Some of them, anyway. ‘Ma says you got to help me with my costume,’ she said.

  ‘Who you supposed to be?’

  Shrub had this way of looking at you, as if everything she saw was new and strange and fabulously complicated, and she was struggling to map the shapes and colours in front of her into a coherent whole. Shrub was looking at Thistle like that now, and Thistle very much wanted to slap her for it. ‘Fink Jon,’ she said finally.

  ‘What you want?’

  ‘Mum says you need to go get me some more beads,’ she said. ‘For my costume.’

  ‘Can’t she do it?’

  ‘She’s cooking.’

  Thistle sighed, pulled himself upright. ‘What am I buying them with?’

  Shrub blinked for a while, sussing her way through the question. Then she recalled the weight she’d been holding in her left hand, opened it and revealed two Aelerian nummus. Thistle snatched them out of her palm as soon as he saw the glitter, stuffed them into his back pocket and made for the stairs.

  ‘Those are for my beads,’ Shrub reminded Thistle’s back, but got no answer.

  Out the front door and Thistle was in the midst of the mob of revellers, sharp elbows and hot sweat. From four storeys up he had found the mass irritating and somewhat shameful. Incorporated within their midst he felt both but more strongly – reeking, drunken fools clogging up the thoroughfares, only interrupting the consumption of food and liquor to stumble over to a canal and piss or vomit, maybe not even all the way to a canal, maybe just lean up against somebody’s home and start leaking onto it.

  The men of the Barrow were porters or bums, with a small smattering of shopkeepers and dockworkers thrown in for good measure. A bum will take any excuse for merriment, a sunny day or a half-full bottle of liquor. For the porters, the Anamnesis was one of the year’s only opportunities for indulgence, an event to be anticipated and treasured upon its arrival. Up before dawn nine days out of ten, down to the docks to pick up whatever shipment of produce or poultry or silk had come in that day. Strap twenty clove worth of goods to your back and hoof it upslope a cable or two or five, standing in line at the gates to each new Rung, waiting for the Cuckoos to check your tattoo, hoping they won’t decide to reject you because the shipowner didn’t pay his requisite bribe, or out of sheer pique. Drop your load off at one of the mid-Rung markets, but don’t think of waiting there too long, or, Founders forbid, of taking a moment to rest, because your kind aren’t wanted upslope, only the things you can carry. Then the jaunt back down to the docks, legs aching, back crooked, two or three more trips before night falls and you can head back to your hovel, down a bowl of stew while your wife complains and your children screech, six hours on a lumpy bed so you can wake up the next day and do it all over again – you couldn’t blame a fellow for taking advantage of an opportunity to drink himself into oblivion.

  Perhaps you couldn’t, but Thistle sure as hell did. He waded through at the fastest clip possible, ignoring the angry looks and occasional outright slurs caused by his brusqueness. Another time and Thistle might have found himself the recipient of a lesson on proper etiquette, and on the volatility of the rabble. But mostly everyone was in too good a mood for needless violence, so he managed to find his way across the thoroughfare without having his cheek repaid.

  On the steps of an abandoned tenement a dozen small children sat at the feet of an old man, listening intently to his story. The youth were dressed in what passed for holiday attire downslope, their usual rags overlaid with flowers and garish dashes of colour. ‘In the days long ago, before your mother was born, before your grandmother knew your grandfather, before your great-grandmother’s first name day; when the mountain was still unbroken, when the sun was fresh and sweet in the sky; we laboured beneath the ground. We hollowed out the stone, we built the slurps to carry water up to the summit. For years and years we laboured, whole generations born and died without ever seeing the light. This is a story of the days before the Founding, of the Time Below.’

  Tipple had seemed ancient when Thistle had been one of the children listening to this story, though the years since hadn’t done much to age him – as if, having reached venerable, his body found itself unable to wither further. His white hair had gone unwashed so long that it clumped together in peaks and crests atop his head. He had blue eyes that looked clouded even when he wasn’t drinking, filmy and pale above a sharply beaked nose. Most days he was a bum, no different to any of the other decrepits too lazy or old to make a living as porters. But on the half-holidays allowed to the humans of the Roost he managed to shake himself back to some semblance of coherence, and regale the youth of the neighbourhood with the pleasant lies they recited on the Fifth.

  ‘Everyone knows that Fink Jon was the cleverest of those who lived below, and Garnet his brother the strongest, and Saffron, whom they both loved, was the fairest. But do you know of Calf the Steadfast? Firm in the cold and the heat, unblinking in the dark, whose strong back bore the sins of his fellows, whose endurance is our deliverance?’

  ‘No,’ chorused the assembled children, though of course they did.

  ‘Those Above came first, and never forget it, because they will not. In the time before time when we Five Fingers came on our endless journey from the west, we found them waiting for us, perfect and beautiful and terrible. And though the land was theirs, theirs since before stone was stone, they allowed us to live in the forests and the fields, to seek shelter beneath the trees, to hunt the beasts that ran and swam and wriggled. And for endless days beneath the sun things continued thus, with the children of the west living beneath the protection of the Wellborn.

  ‘But then came the cursed generation, and the Transgression, the crime for which we have not yet paid, the crime which we can never repay. And so terrible and so heinous was the Transgression that the Wellborn decided to extinguish the very line of man, to proscribe it entirely, from the child still at suck to the oldest greybeard. And so the King of the Birds brought all of the children of the west together, and prepared to execute this terrible and just sentence.’

  A vendor passed by hawking sausages, street meat speared on a length of branch. Thistle handed him one of Shrub’s coins and waited while the man slipped a link of pork onto the small brazier he carried, watching the skin crisp while Tipple talked nonsense.

  ‘And then a man came out from among the Five-Fingered, and his name was Calf, and he was a son of those that had been cursed. And Calf went to the King, though to look upon him was as to look at the noonday sun. And he said “Give us leave and we will labour for you, we and our children and their children after that, until the very sun ceases to give light, and the land grows dark and cold.”’

  The vendor picked the sausage up in his oily hands, blew on it and passed it over. Thistle bit into it, feeling the juice run down the scruff of his not quite beard.

  ‘And the King of the Birds asked Calf, “How can you make this promise for all of the children of the west? For I know you to be a false people, and breakers of oaths, a people that cannot be trusted.” And Calf said to the King of the Birds, “Their sins will be my sins, and their punishment mine.” And so the King of the Birds led Calf and the people down into the mountain, where there was no light and no breeze, where rivers ran that had never known the sight of the sun. And the King of the Birds told the people to hollow out the mountain, and to make the waters reach up into the sky.’

  It was the same story that Tipple had been telling for years, the same one that Thistle had heard when he was a boy. Thistle had hated it even then and sure as the pit he hated it now, hated the thought of his sisters mouthing the words that he’d once repeated.

 
; ‘And though the task seemed mad, and impossibly cruel, still Calf led the people in their labours. And there was neither sun nor moon beneath the earth, and time went on for ever. And at the end of the day that was not a day the King of the Birds called Calf to come to him, and he said, “There was one among your people who did not labour. There was one among your people who remained false.” And Calf bowed his head. And the next day which was not a day, when it was time again to delve the stone, Calf did the work of two, and carried the burdens of that child of the west who would not labour.’

  Suddenly Thistle wasn’t hungry, the sausage in his mouth a reeking mass of fat and oil and probably consisting of no small portion of rat meat. ‘Birdshit,’ he said, loudly enough that the flock of seated children turned their eyes on him, forced a sudden sense of shame atop the rising tide of anger. He tossed the half-stick of meat onto the ground and stomped off.

  It was a bad day to walk around angry, what with the whole Rung drunk and laughing, looking to kiss or screw or at least dance. Rat and Felspar and the rest of the boys would be down at the pumps, getting a buzz on before the main event, expecting him to swing by. So Thistle didn’t go down to the pumps, instead swapped an inebriate one of his nummus for a half-empty bottle of rotgut and headed east, settling himself atop a quiet stretch along the Sweet Water canal, quiet in the sense that it was not thronged with revellers.

  This year he wasn’t going to watch it, he told himself. He told himself the same thing every year, but this time he really meant it. The music coming in from the docks was getting louder, the kind that made you want to shake your hips, or stand in the back and watch some pretty girl shake hers. Thistle realised he was bobbing his head, scowled and willed himself into stillness.

  The bottle was empty. Thistle tossed it into the water, watched it float towards the docks. Then he sighed, and stood, and followed it downslope.

  When the canal intersected with Bright Street, and a snaking line of laughing, hooting festivalgoers, Thistle took a detour atop one of the pipes, balancing himself on the narrow length of metal. The pipes had come first and the city had been built around them, iron arteries threading their way through narrow lines of tenements and across tiny plots of broken land. At some points it rose a few dozen links off the ground, and a fall would leave you with a broken arm next to a stranger’s back door – but Thistle had been doing this since he was younger than Apple, and moved swiftly and without much conscious thought. His pipe ended at the very crest of the small ridge that overlooked the quay. Thistle dangled his feet over the ledge and started rolling a smoke.