The Broken House

by Tom La Farge

  “You look very fit,” the Sacellary told him. “The picture of health.” Lhool had him on a regimen now. The God knew what it was he was eating, but he’d lost weight, gained stamina. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a stranger; a body hardened in health, the body Lhool maintained.

  The Sacellary sat bent, clutching a strap, a blanket over his shanks, but he chattered cheerily as the phaeton groaned down the boulevards, heading towards the port. Root’s scenario for the nautomachy had been accepted; today its author must view the Artificial Ocean, to see how to stage and light a play with a naval battle in it. Then write the script.

  The Sacellary chattered news. The foreign enemy had declared themselves publicly in a conference leading to a treaty of coalition among the Republics. The coalition had established a Protectorate in the Hook with a High Commissioner sitting in Rhem to administer it. Meanwhile the Company of Schools had been placed under the Domestic Shandimus’ command, for the defense of the City. The Megas Kyr, now on a spiritual retreat, had signed the order. Stables and Mules would shortly follow suit. “My dear boy, Shandimus will at last dispose of a trained fighting force in all its branches. The Politic Companies unified under one commander! We’ll see it yet!”

  “Don’t you worry he’ll declare himself Despot?”

  The Sacellary laughed heartily. “Monstrous thought! Despot Shandimus? No, he’ll settle for Senator.”

  The phaeton dropped them at the gates of the Artificial Ocean, where hundreds of flags snapped in the breeze. An attendant led them through a silly bit of garden, and there it was. The water spread like a mirror, unnaturally bright. It was coated in some reflective oil; the breeze hardly stirred it. Around it a world had been cast in cement, shaped and tinted to look like hills, fields, villages, and at the inland end the City in 1/20 scale. At the sight of trees cast in metal, clear and neat in every detail, Root felt uncommonly large and ungainly. Fleetingly he imagined the brisk little midgets who would inhabit such a world and their piping voices.

  To his right the scale volcano rose and across from it the black pharos of Rhem. They climbed the volcano and took seats below the Throne that stood in for the palace. The attendant waved a flag, and electric boats, blue and green, banked silently around the Point of Rhem. The boats had not been built to scale, and the athletes who manned them stood higher than the model pharos. They sped by and then faced off in battle-formation. When the flag had once again been twirled, they attacked each other, raising tidal waves, peppering each other with gunfire, and then pitched down in emblematic ways. In reality the water was just deep enough to cover the sunken warships. After the show a crane would winch them up to float again. But now, when one went down, the sailors hopped off and swam or waded in to shore, where they lined up, a race of beautifully proportioned giants facing the Throne. They were all caneball players, famous and rich. The two fleets were manned by rival teams, Blues and Greens. The Blues, Root knew, had Old-Believer leanings, but neither the Yellows nor the Purples could match their game.

  Root admired the athletes’ perfected bodies. Men their age were being wounded in the war: technicians, farmboys, tribesmen. Then Root thought of a dance he would have. He proposed it. One Blue sneered, “What, like this?” and mimed a ludicrous death-spasm. But Root explained the sort of slowed movements he had in mind, and then the Green captain made a speech.

  “We’ll do what you ask, kyr,” he said, “to remember the sacrifices of our brothers fighting this war.” Not much the Blues could say to that.

  “Now I’ll show you your office,” said the Sacellary, tugging him. “And after that we’ll have a little lunch.”

  They were driven to the palace up steep streets. From a lofty terrace Root looked down and saw the real City in miniature. There was the Bay of Rhem, an arm of Ocean; there on its rim the little pocket of Artificial Ocean. There was Citadel Hill; to the left, Mole Place. There the Mother made her halfmoon sweep past the old wharves. That jumble, far to the left, was the Fondooq in its tree-tufted enclosure. The Roohaneeya, where his work was, that was the Fondooq’s tallest jut. All below him thousands of little houses filled in the neighborhoods with quadrilateral wells around a court. Washing hung from lines on each flat roof. Higher roofs framed the broader courts of mansions, ministries, convents. Here and there Root saw a garden, a pool catching light. Everyone was indoors, eating or stretching out to nap.

  The palace itself was a miniature world whose proportions corrected the monstrosities of the chaotic world, or outdid them. Nothing here but power and prestige wrought out in snowy stone, gold and lapis tilework, porphyry and alabaster fountains spraying scented coolness, shadow and silence punctuated only by the vividness of birds. Without which, Root thought, the place would be a fucking necropolis.

  The Sacellary led Root up stairs, across terraces to the Old Quince Walk. A great shed had been squeezed into it. “You’ll work here,” said the Sacellary, and he opened a door between the last two quince standing. Inside, a roomy darkness resounded with drips. “Here,” said the Sacellary, his voice ringed in watery, stony echo, “let me switch on the sun.” An arclight flooded the shed with glare. Beneath it spread a large tank filled with foul green water; scale model of a scale model.

  “Anything at all that you require will be furnished you. The nautomachy is at present the very first of the Despot’s concerns. Ask for what you need, and the same will be provided in full scale at the real Artificial Ocean. Here is your office.” He led Root into a room laid alongside the shed, where long tables were heaped with plans and instruments. Root picked up a lovingly crafted little speedboat and studied the two bright brass propellers jutting from its hull. “He loves his toys! He’s already tested the photosensors. You need only do the lighting and come up with a script. And now, if you’re ready, Kyra Kaliskopa and Kyra ’Nna are waiting for us. Let’s join them!” the Sacellary urged. “I’m a hungry minister!”

  A table was laid for four amid the delicate marble statues of the Despina’s Women’s cloister. ’Nna was a Woman now and wore the hobbled skirt; wore also a correctness and an ease not quite effortless, as if she were a foreignborn princess enrolled to add spice and color. She made a pause before speaking, as if translating nuance into felicitousness.

  “Has the Sacellary mentioned the newspaper, Syr Root?” ’Nna asked. “You are to edit it! A new one, with pictures, essays, sketches of modern life.”

  “Fashions,” added Kaliskopa. “Sporting events. The arts!”

  “And, of course, politics,” said the Sacellary. “My dear fellow, don’t answer now, your plate is full. Metaphorically!” Kaliskopa put a slice of jellied something on the literal one. “But it’s an opportunity! We hope that Drytung will write. Esterday has promised us a philosophical column. Lady Fayte and Lady Vinesap will write, Korto will toss in a nugget from time to time. Thorn will do us up a sharp political piece. The Bros. Crow won’t come near it; you can rout them, eclipse them.”

  “What made you think of me?”

  “Oh, no one knows better than Root of the Roohaneeya how to bring different voices into harmony,” said Kaliskopa.

  “And you’re one of us. The salary,” said the Sacellary, wiping the corner of his mouth, “will be handsome. The funding, you see, is ministerial.”

  “Then the paper will be in your interest.”

  “Absolute freedom, my dear boy. I know you and trust you completely. You will never hear a peep out of me. But I think,” he added, “that you will be surprised to learn how nearly the ministerial interest now matches your own.”

  “The new current,” said ’Nna. After a second Root got it. That was what the paper would be called: The New Current.

  “Sounds revolutionary.”

  “Yes,” said ’Nna. “But not rebellious. There is a new spirit spreading in the City. The Despot and Despina want a newspaper to express it.”

  “Rally it,” said Kaliskopa.

  “Give it a shape,” said the Sacellary. �
��We want to turn the restlessness of young people in a good direction. We have a war to win! We want to build a really professional army around a spirit of national pride, you see. An army for the Motherland; they’ll line up to enlist. Here, look at this.”

  He held up a photograph. “That’s Miyano,” said Root wonderingly. The photograph showed him in uniform, head turned right and upwards, a sharp profile grinning with patriotic élan beneath a high-brimmed casquet.

  “Yes,” the Sacellary smiled, “what a transformation, eh? This outrageous Protectorate has stiffened the spines of those who have done nothing but fuss and hatch plots. Now they see, or soon will (that’s your job, my dear fellow) that the Despot and the Despina will lead them on a quest for revitalization!”

  “And revenge,” suggested Root.

  “Of course they want their property back. But they will fight for national honor now, they will learn to obey and conduct themselves professionally, they will rise by merit, and in the peace to come they will enter public life in a spirit of patriotic service.”

  “They will find in your pages the models to imitate, the paths to follow to be beautiful and useful,” said ’Nna.

  “Like Miyano,” said Kaliskopa.

  “Is he beautiful and useful?” Root asked.

  The Sacellary raised his eyebrows. “He carries the Motherland in his heart and views death as a ravishing bride.”

  “I see.”

  “Think it over, my dear fellow,” said the Sacellary. “Nautomachy first. Thorn will handle the first few numbers.”

  Root worked in the shed on the Old Quince Walk all that afternoon and straight on through the night. He walked around and around the tank, studying the tiny details with a torch. He ran the little boats, which whined and stirred up froth and stink. He switched the pharos on and off. Four pages showed up, and he sent them off with sheets of orders. If he were going to make the Artificial Ocean look less like a maniac’s playground and more like a microcosm, he was going to have to light it. The nautomachy must take place at night for the lighthunting falcon to work. Before that climax, he could sculpt the scene in lights, get a little life into it. The model in the shed seemed exact. When the lights came, he got down to it.

  By daybreak, when he thought he’d made a start, he went out to get some air. The fumes from the water made him sick, he’d need to have it pumped out and replaced, but in another way he felt better than he had for weeks. Health, he decided, wasn’t good for him. It turned him into something inflexible. He lit a cigarette and coughed, feeling tar coat his throat. It wasn’t that he wanted to be sick. But he didn’t want to be thinking that he wasn’t to die.

  Turned to stone. The Sacellary, Kaliskopa, Miyano, all were turning to stone. Not ’Nna; she was faking it, she had some game on. But the others had shrunk to figures in the scale of the Artificial Ocean. A hardening around a denial. Because, he thought, there really is an Ocean. Somewhere out there a great huge limitless shapeless thing washes around with ships tossing on it. That was why the Artificial Ocean disgusted him, and the muscular health and the jingo cant of the athletes. Those impenetrable bodies denied the real wounds of soldiers. In the same sort of way the style wanted for The New Current would deny and displace the unspeakable. It would confirm the implications of the Artificial Ocean; it would make them inescapable. Everyone would reduce by nineteen parts to accommodate to its scale, to fit.

  Here came the Sacellary up the stair, climbing like a clockwork toy. Root watched as he raised his head, spread a smile, waved a hand he must at once slap back on the banister, lips contracting in a grimace as he labored up, hips rolling.

  Root drew on his cigarette and studied his own mortality. The smoke touched it but did not liberate it. He could remind himself by smoking that he was capable of dying. But he needed art. An art breaks open, doesn’t it? An art reconnects the field within to the field without.

  Root rose to shake the Sacellary’s hand.

  “Look here!” wheezed the old man, unfurling a newspaper. In huge type he read: HOOK FREE PRESS. “Here’s your competition! Printed in Rhem! A dirigible balloon dropped five bundles into Mole Place. Look here, dear boy: we’re savages!”

  barbarians routed by protectorate troops

  Shandimus driven back into hills

  He pointed to a leading article and Root read it. He saw that Zbaqdeem was under attack; that was the village just up from the market where he had learned how to do impossible seeing.

  “What do you say now to this editorship?”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Root, “when I get back from the war.”

  “Back from the war? Iftooby!” sighed the Sacellary. “Though you will establish your patriotic credentials. Well; Thorn can hold the reins a little longer, I suppose. Take care of yourself! Stay fit!”

  “Do my best,” growled Root.

  32.

  The Cellar of Women

  When the first gas shell burst over the hill, Root scrambled out of his foxhole and ran, before the invisible tide could find him, blind him, close his throat behind it as it reached blistering fingers into his lungs. He ran downhill into the breeze blowing off the water. It was the ocean and it sparkled. A dome rose between him and the flashing, the shrine among the rocks, the market square below it, open toward him, soldiers there and a machine-gun. “Don’t shoot!” he screamed and ran among them. “They’re dropping gas up there!”

  Annag made a face. “Root! Are you all right?” He nodded and looked around. Women, twenty of them. He took his place among them, behind the sandbags, looked back to the hills. No one was coming down the track.

  “What’s happening on our right?” Annag asked, but he’d seen no movement there. “They’ll come from that side. They won’t go in the hills with gas around.” She sent a helmeted girl up a ladder to see. A loud tock, and they turned to see the girl fall back windmilling. “They’re here,” said Root. “They’ll come on faster now.” The machinegunner at that moment swung her piece hard right and opened fire. There were shouts from outside. Root took his rifle and crawled up the ladder, slipping like a serpent onto the flat roof, then crawling to the parapet opposite. He found a weephole and opened it wider by twisting his bayonet, then took aim at a black veil. Answering bullets droned by or smashed into stuccoed clay.

  “Old Believers!” he yelled over his shoulder. “At least a company. Get out now! Get out, go!” The Old Believers had doctrinal justification for their treatment of female prisoners. He heard a motorcycle chug and groan: Annag and as many as she could carry riding pillion or packed into the sidecar.

  He thought next about what he had better do. Bullets ripped the air and kicked a rain of rubble from the parapet. They had his range. The machinegun below fired bursts, the gunner covering her comrades’ escape. So he hoped. Escape where?

  The machinegun ceased its chatter as a woman cursed and choked. In the lull that followed, Root rolled over, considered the breeze, the mackerel sky, the smell of seaweed, the sun’s warmth, all impregnations, pleasant ones, of the space of death, through which no pathway offered. He could not, as ’Nna had done, pull lively creatures from his body to counter the monsters. She was greater than he. All he could do was to stare at his own death. But then he thought of the tomb.

  He crawled along the roof to where it turned the corner and then crawled farther. Men were shouting below in the court. They’d entered the market and seen the ladder, so he redoubled his wriggle and at the next angle slipped over the parapet to land, hands first, on rocks a few feet down. The shrine stood over him, the door thirty feet away. He slithered, doing his best to keep out of sight of the soldiers he saw on the beach, pointing at Annag’s tiretracks in the sand. Two feet from the door he froze, head down, face covered, lying on his rifle. An Old Believer walked the market roof, singing a tedious hymn. He stood for several verses at the corner Root had just come over. And then moved on, confirmed in blind faith. Root reached for the doorhandle.

 
; The dome inside rose milky and unfigured around the long oblong slab raised slightly from the floor. All around it heaps of dried seaweed had been pressed flat by sleepers waiting for their dream. He thought the Old Believers would not enter this space, though they might shell it. He lay back on fragrant crackling weed and looked up at the dome, hoping for a better dream than Protectorate artillery. Rounded, shadowless, the shrine held its own dim day, offering nothing but emptiness. But this is what I wanted, Root thought. He set about it, closing his eyes. What he could find within he swept into shapes, contradictions that might engage and resolve in his blankness. But they had no interior stuff, somehow. They dissolved as quickly as he formed them. I’m going to sleep, he astonished himself by thinking.

  Then there was an explosion. The building jumped, Root opened his eyes. The slab that closed the tomb had shifted, and he saw the first white step of a stair going down. He gave the slab a shove, far enough to let him step inside. Six steps down put his eye on a level with the tiles. He looked to see he’d left no trace, then closed the tomb.

  Root sat a moment in absolute night. He could not hear his breath nor feel a heartbeat. Everything he touched was stone. He went down steep steps wondering if he were inventing them. “Thirty should do it,” he reckoned. But he had lost count when a pulsing pallor grew ahead of him. His outstretched hand met a wall; the light came from the left, and he turned into it.

  A deep hall ran back into shadows. He stood on a dais facing row upon row of women sitting on benches. Some wore tribal robes, some uniforms; whatever they wore, they had taken most of it off, and their skins were pearled with sweat. Light flickered and danced on their sheen, and their eyes reflected things in motion. Were they receiving their dream, all at once? Their rapt expressions suggested as much, but as Root changed position, he saw it was not so.