The City (23 page)

The dank chambers on the ground floor of the House of Glass
housed the furnace, a workroom and storage space. At the rear was a small courtyard, the home of brown rats and the white cats which preyed on them. The first floor housed storage and a small kitchen, scarcely used. Above that was a parlour and study, and above that a jumble of bedrooms on two floors, also mostly unlived-in.

The workroom at the top of the house was reached by a sturdy wooden ladder, cursed daily by those obliged to climb it. The dark-haired young woman who worked up there didn’t care. The room was bright and airy, and she loved it, and no amount of grumbling by her father, or by lame Frayling who worked for them, or by the parade of servants and housekeepers drafted in to clean the house, made any difference.

The girl sat in the wide west window, her bare feet up on the sill, looking out over the bustling City, across the jumble and tumble of roofs. Lindo was a poor quarter, bounded to the north by Burman Far and to the west by the Old Wall. Far below her was a maze of alleys and squalid streets, thousands of shanties built of richer people’s refuse. Dotted about were big dark ruined buildings, once the homes of the wealthy, now rookeries for the poorest of the poor. There were few houses as tall as the House of Glass, so her view stretched over squalid Lindo, towards far Otaro with its turrets and grey forests, to the Red Palace in the misty distance. The mist had been lying heavily on the City since the Great Flood two months before; in the early mornings it looked like the sea, grey and troubled, from which tall buildings poked like outcrops of rock.

She turned back to the workroom and her work. The attic room was alive with light and colour. Sheets of stained glass leaned against walls and low-set windows, refracting the sunlight in a thousand sparkling patches of crimson and ochre and leaf green splashing across the plaster walls. On a big oak table in the centre lay the sections of glass for the window she was working on. It was a tall, narrow panel commissioned for the home of a fat merchant in Otaro. She gazed at it critically but with pride. At the top of the panel a silver leviathan basked on sunlit waters, spume blowing from his head. At the base of the window a green-skinned giant of the deep crept across golden sand, its tentacles oozing ahead of it. Between the two monsters was a seething stew of fishes in every colour of the spectrum, framed by waving fronds of flowering plants.

‘Where did you see such coloured fish?’ her father had asked,
believing she had never seen the sea, nor knew anyone who had.

She had shrugged. She had seen enough fish on the fishmonger’s stall, their scales shining in delicate shades of pink and green and brown. She imagined that they lost their colours in death, as people did, and that in life they had shimmered with the brightest colours available to the gods’ palette. So now she fashioned green fish with gold stripes, and red fish with blue heads, and herds of tiny fish in every shade of yellow she could create, each with a crest of black. The leviathan had golden teeth, the squid blue eyes. The sea itself was dappled silver, but it was lost beneath the swirling collage of movement and colour.

The panel was nearly finished. Most of the panes of glass were laid in place on the wide central table. She had two more sections to complete, important ones near the base, which would lie at eye level on the merchant’s wall. There were the tips of the monster’s tentacles – green on yellow. And her own sign. Then, when the final panes had been baked in the kiln, fixing the paint to the glass surface, Frayling would join her to help cut and solder the lead calms which would bind the whole work into one piece.

She walked over to the original watercolour painting of the panel, now well worn and ragged, which she had first pinned to the wall more than half a year before. She looked at it for a while, then returned to the table of glass. She closed her eyes and relaxed her shoulders, letting her thoughts calm and settle into the creatures on the panel. She imagined the tentacles, their sinewy rubbery strength. She saw them touch the sand, then reach forward, groping.

Then there was a step on the ladder, a stumble and an oath. She frowned a little and allowed her mind to drift back to the workroom.

‘This year, by all the cursed gods, I will have a staircase built!’ Her father’s head, grey-haired and tousled, appeared in sight, and he struggled up the rest of the steps into the room.

She smiled and raised her eyebrows at him. He saw her look and admitted, ‘I know, I say that every year. But next summer I’ll do it, I swear. Frayling will leave us if he has to carry many more sheets of glass up here.’

She watched him fondly. There was no red left in his hair, and his face was heavily lined with age and sad experience. He avoided her gaze and looked down at the floor. When he spoke it was with reluctance. She guessed what he was going to say.

‘The merchant’s servant has been here. He wants you to go to his house to see the fitting of the window.’

A wave of panic trembled across her stomach, and she shook her head. ‘You,’ she whispered, pleading.

‘I know I can do it,’ he replied gravely, ‘and I will go with you, but it is a matter of courtesy. This is your most important commission. He is a good client. And he is a good man. He does not deserve your disrespect.’

There was metal in his voice she seldom heard, and her heart sank, for she knew she could not refuse him. She hated meeting people, and feared to speak to them. Many people thought she could not speak, and called her ‘dummy’ behind her back, and sometimes to her face. The fact was that she used her words sparingly, as if she had merely a cupful which she offered to people a drop at a time. Her windows spoke for her, she believed.

She did not need words to tell her father how she felt about visiting the merchant.

‘How long?’ he asked her, glancing at the oak table.

She held up four fingers.

‘Then I will tell him we will deliver on the last day of the month.’ He walked over to the south window. Outside a sturdy pulley had been fixed to the wooden beams jutting out over the alley. ‘This is the biggest work you have ever fashioned. It will be very heavy. I think it should be lowered down in two, maybe three, parts. And reassembled at the merchant’s house.’

He saw the unwillingness in her face, and added, ‘It is very heavy, and very fragile, and it is worth half a year’s work to you. It is a long way to Otaro. If there were an accident, it would be best to lose only a third of your work, rather than all of it.’

He was right, of course, but she could not explain to him, if she even had the words, how important it was to her to finish the whole work in one piece and see it leave the House of Glass complete. The last half-year had been blissful. Her heart had raced with excitement each morning as she awoke and thought of her work for the day. These last few days would be sad, for the sea window she had lavished all her skill and love on would be gone. If it were to leave this place in pieces, unfinished, it would leave an empty place in her heart.

But, she thought, the days would be spoiled now anyway, with the prospect of meeting the fat-faced merchant, and the friends and
hangers-on who would no doubt be invited to see the window put into place. They would all glance at her from the corners of their eyes and, when they thought she was not watching, speak to each other in hushed tones, smirking or sympathetic, according to their natures.

Her father looked at her levelly, awaiting her reaction, so she forced a smile and nodded. He knew it was forced, and loved her for her bravery. And she loved him for not mentioning it.

‘Thank you, little soldier,’ he said.

Bartellus climbed back down the steps, stopping from time to time to ease his aching knee. When he and Em had first taken the house in Blue Duck Alley he had looked doubtfully at the steep stairways, and the ladder up to the workroom, but thought to himself he would seldom have reason to go there. In fact, he now spent part of each day up there with Emly. He loved to watch her work. He had always admired her grace and strength, even as a child. Now she had added to that a skill beyond his comprehension. He saw the delicate paintings she made of her planned work, and marvelled as she turned thin paper and delicate brushwork into superb stained glass windows which delighted the eye and warmed the soul. She would take panes of plain glass fashioned by Frayling in his workroom on the ground floor, and transform them, reshaping them by nibbling away at the edges with a tool called a grozing iron, then painting them with black paint, creating faces, and muscles, and, in this panel, waving sea fronds, the spots on the monster’s tentacles, and fishy frills.

Emly loved her work, and she loved the home where, he hoped, she had been happy for the first time in her life. But she knew, just as he did, although they had never discussed it, that they would have to move on soon. They did not lead the life of fugitives, but that was what they were.

Bartellus slipped out of the side door and turned into Blue Duck Alley, following its meandering length away from the Old Wall. They were in the part of the City called Lindo. It had once been a place of wealth and privilege, but that was many centuries before. Most older people called it the Armoury, because for generations the forges of the emperor’s armourers were situated there, benefiting from the brisk north wind that blew perpetually along its sloping streets. But the City grew, and the armourers and their forges were
relocated further south and east, towards the edges of the City and closer to the armies they supplied.

Now the Armoury’s high houses of the rich, those that still stood, were grim rookeries for the elderly. In a City permanently at war, those who survived their years of armed service had nothing to look forward to in old age except a half-life crippled by injury and by the dementia that was a curse on all the aged. The rookeries housed the dregs of the City, maimed or demented old men and women, packed into verminous apartments, dozens to a room, barely living, barely alive. In his short time in the sewers they called the Halls, Bartellus had never seen such squalor as dwelt in the rookeries of Lindo.

Between the rookeries were the smoking shacks and shanties of the working poor, those who struggled to maintain a craft when materials often could not be had, and the workers in the houses of the rich in wealthy Otaro and Gervain. The jumble of huts, built of timber and tin and cardboard and debris, moved constantly, and the maze of alleys between them shifted daily. It was easy to get lost in their depths and careful folk went nowhere near them.

The whole quarter had been scoured clean of these patchwork homes in the devastating flood two months before. Bartellus, riding out the storm with Emly and Frayling in the House of Glass, saw them swept away and thought them gone for good. Yet within days the surviving inhabitants had returned and started rebuilding.

Since the Great Flood and the destruction of the Maritime Army the City’s situation had become dire. Supply routes were interrupted and supplies dried up. Fewer citizens could make an honest living. Crime was soaring. The poor people of Lindo had to steal to feed their children and themselves. Only four years ago it had been unsafe to go out at night. Now it was perilous in the hours of daylight too, and Bartellus always went armed. Under his old greatcoat, slung over his shoulders to keep his arms free, he strapped a large knife, honed to perfect sharpness, in a sturdy leather scabbard. He had used it several times, and his hand was ready on the haft as he strode down Blue Duck Alley.

He crossed Parting Street, the main thoroughfare leading north out of the City, and the border between Lindo and neighbouring Burman Far. The stench of tanneries and slaughterhouses, which had been in his nostrils since he stepped out of his home, started to fade. Here in Burman, a place of markets and bakeries and grain
houses, the streets were patrolled by militias employed by the powerful so they could walk unmolested in daylight.

Bartellus walked through the People’s Market, his destination most days. He passed the half-empty stalls, sad old women with their small offerings of sesame seeds or cobnuts who wailed at him to buy as he passed, small boys from beleaguered farms in the north trying to sell small bags of potatoes for a single pente each. The wine-sellers had gone, and the meat-vendors. In a small pen malnourished flyblown cattle were being sold off as a last resort by a desperate smallholder.

The People’s Market was a place of information. Not just gossip, although there was plenty of that, for over the years Bartellus had learned to judge the progress of the wars by the foodstuffs available on the stalls. Today, he saw that the only fish available was river fish, which meant the sea routes were blocked, or the military had commandeered fishing boats for some doomed enterprise. Either way, there was a crisis on the western, seaward, side of the City. But there were plenty of spices – corima, fellseed and red ghurr – which indicated a boat had arrived from the far south and west, perhaps two or three days ago. So the crisis which had deprived the City of sea fish had only happened in the last day or so.

The information was of more than passing interest to him, and he wondered about the state of the armies and of the City, beleaguered as it was by enemies on every side. He could not ask. Since he and Em emerged from the Halls eight years earlier he had kept his head low. To the poor folk of the Armoury he was Old Bart, the glassmaker’s father. No one questioned his history. As an old man he was invisible, and that was the way he planned to keep it.

He bought two loaves, warm from the oven. The price was higher than ever, which meant grain was harder to come by. The bakery was guarded by men with cudgels. Bartellus chewed on one of the loaves as he wandered around the market stalls, hiding the other under his coat. He bought a bag of dried figs and one of red rice, then negotiated with a burly Garamund farmer for a basket of green apples. These were rare and costly, but he knew Em loved them. He paid an urchin a pente to take the food back to the House of Glass, promising Frayling would pay him the same on receipt.