Work Text:
The General sits in his wheeled chair by the desk in his offices, drinking spiced tea. His Commander stands at attention by the door, stories of the land below impassive through his vocoder, his own cup ignored on the corner of the desk.
1
The city of Vordapethe sprawls lowly. No spires pierce the sky, no domes lace the horizon like the paths of leaping amphibians. The roofs are flat, wide breadths of slate. No rain ever falls from the sky. The houses have no guttering and instead stand on tall stilts above the bubbling reservoir of water that rises through the stones. Walkways sling between the single storey buildings that stand on their spindled legs, men and women crossing them with buckets tied to their stooped backs, the ever-giving well-spring dipped into. Spiral conch-shell stairs connect the many-roomed churches to the surface of the water and the priests sit on the bottom of the steps, washing their feet.
2
A star’s throw from there, a traveller could find himself entering the bazaar of Anderol, see the women sell their fine spun silks and the men their fine crushed spices, witness the blood of the butchered fish running through the cobbles to the grate. In the second city below, men drink the blood dripping from the gutter above, these lizard men who coax the silk from the spinning-worms and weaving-spiders, who grow saffron flowers and cumin plants in the light through the fish-blood-grate. Lizard men who hold their bazaar at the mouth of the Anderol sewers. These trading cities, one atop the other.
3
Twin cities grow in a wide open plain that stretches for miles, unbroken beige and dust with crops of dying bushes. The first, Helamai, grows outwards, the centre thick with old towers and spires that lean crookedly like the palisades of fir trees on the leeward side of a hill where the wind has stooped them by turning years, and outwards low buildings hunker up out of the dry grass. At first tightly knit and taller by the scraping, leaning towers, and then outwards slowly looser like the edges of a thrown handful of rice, so perhaps if a traveller was walking in from the outside he might not quite notice he were in the city until it had well and truly snared him. The second, Lorusk, grows from the inside, out. The edges marked thickly by a thicketing wall of spires and old houses, the ancient palaces and the homes of their servants in the first years, and then gradually drops down from the towering built upon slums and palazzos of the old-town to the centre of the city where the machinery works, hot steam and the clanking of hidden, turning cogs below the earth, below the new-town where fresh white houses are slung below steadily creeping scaffolding and the industrious ants of ever-employed builders. Concentric circles of new buildings growing from the centre like a tree grows in girth.
The augurs say that when the twin cities finally meet the earth shall rend, and like two continental plates the cities shall grind together and rise making a mountain range between the two, teethed with Loruskian palaces and Helamain suburbs.
*
“But what shall you tell me of the men you went there to fight?” asks the General over the rim of his cup of tea. His rooms smell of herbs that grew in the sewers of Anderol, the Commander has given him Vordapethe spring water to brew it, and the steam dances in eddying circles like the growth of cities.
The Commander stands, holding a cup of the steaming tea, his helm still firmly in place. “If I tell you of the people, of the cities, of the worlds, you shall grow to know the war.”
4
Gredewan is all made of arches and the swooping courses of aqueducts loop the air, the water sings and bubbles with sparkling sprites, nymphs hang from the windows watching travellers with their hair soaked to eerie cheeks. They are round and plump as deep, salted oceans; or curved and crook’d like old crones or oxbow lakes; or waif thin as the meandering, trickling stream. The buildings are all glass and singing with echoes that reverberate so hollowly it seems everything is a trick of the light, an oasis you have reached but still cannot lap the sweetness of.
There are riches every place you look, glimmering behind glass walls and below glass arches and floating, abandoned in the glass fountain. And there are men. Slathering, singing mad-men, pawing at the glass for which there are no doors and dunking themselves again and again in the fountain, with no gold in their grasping hands or gnashing teeth, and trying to climb those slick glass trellises and mezzanine arches to speak to the nymphs who watch them, silent.
Then a traveller might pause, looking for something real in this glittering, shimmering transparency, glance at his boots to see perhaps a drainage grate or little flowered weeds growing between cobbles or a dead pigeon in the gutter; and he would see instead that the street is made of glass and the earth beneath it glass or curiously clear water and he can see all the way through to the stars. And maybe this traveller would conclude that Gredewan was not real at all, some shimmering apparition on a far-off horizon, some dreamt up vessel of beautiful women and water and glass and abundant treasures, but then he might look up again and the nymph at the nearest window might smile with sharpened teeth.
5
It once was the skull of a giant, this Threz. Threz which sits where a brain might have, the palace and the abbey where the two eyeballs might have rolled, the slums where the teeth must have crunched. And in the cavity where the nose might have sat, come the star-ships with their silver-spun ice-cold star-rending hulls, those space-faring heavy warriors so small where the nostrils filled once with snot. On the edge of the bone where cartilage and skin rotted away, wares are laid out on mats of red and yellow and green. Lizards pickled in jars, dried fruits in small tins, heady spices in heaped piles, rice and grains in sacks made from old carpets, and oh the carpets! So many that they look like heavy flags hanging limp from every wall and post and fence, whole tents made of carpets to sell. Carpets, for those who walk on cold hard bone, day by day. The streets are layered in carpets, the houses, the steps to the palace, the star-dock.
The luxuries of Threz: to have your feet bare and warm.
6
A traveller imagines, as he marches, a city. He imagines the houses and their doors and their steps, he imagines where the churches sit, perhaps around the central square, with the big house where the mayor or the disinherited prince live, and the fruit tree growing in the centre, or the well. He imagines the market stalls around this apple-well, outside the church-temple and the merchant-duke-prince-mayor’s house, and the many singing birds of a thousand colours sitting on the thin, pursed lips of the roofs, the swinging weathervane and the lion-lizard-woman on the hanging sign of the public house. And this city might or might not have a name, as it grows out of the drooling spine of the horizon, as you begin to draw the towers and pointed apexes and the colour of the city walls. But as soon as you name the city, it becomes something else entirely.
As soon as it has a name, its map is fixed and the house is owned by a particular man and you know the name of the Governess in the priory and you could eat pears from the tree in the centre of the square while men sell you fleeces from the big-horned sheep that live here. And once the city has a name, it isn’t yours any more, and the birds are only a drab blue and they sit in the guttering and sing one song with the bawdy landlord of the Ramhorn Pub.
7
One such city might come crawling out of that drool, that humming, dusted mirage of the horizon. Xiiron, the city of a thousand streets. And every street is named meticulously, straight towards the centre like a web, with every name written on the cobbles at the mouth. And from every shop hangs a sign so you know it without having to look, the sharp scissors for the barber and the hexagonal card for the sabacc den and the scale for the square where the food-hall market sits.
But if you actually look in Xiiron, the city that is every city, every name is a street you grew up on and every townhouse the very one your friend lived in when you were young and every face as they pass almost familiar in an eerily comforting way. There are visitors’ maps by the front gates but you already know the way, like you’ve returned home to a place you never knew.
*
“You did not grow up on a street, Cody,” says the General. His tea is finished and he is looking, contemplative, from the window of his office, hands folded in his lap, at the new planet below them and all the secrets it might hold. “You never visited a childhood friend in a beautiful house.”
“I never said the house was beautiful.” The Commander has placed his cold tea on the edge of the desk again after smelling the lip of it, and is turning the trinkets he brought home from a thousand cities over in his hands, like tumbling water from a tap. “And maybe there were no streets at all.”
“And if I had come with you, what would I have seen?”
“Blood, the tanks, the smoke.”
“And I would have heard the guns?”
“You would.”
“Familiar to you,” says the General, “like a childhood.”
8
Two rivers cross before their tongues meet the sea, at the junction of which the city of Lees squats. Lees is one uniform blockade of spires, each one the same height, never petering off naturally into the land like the inelegant sprawls of so many other cities. Every person seems to live at the top of a turret, and every one of them is a prince or princess living decadently on reclined beds of silks. Industry rumbles in the clean streets below, where no-one ever walks except the custodians of Lees: droids all in delicate silver and with bowed heads, carrying bowls of food and soiled sheets and brooms with which to remove the cobwebs in all the rooms which aren’t the very tops of the towers, where no-one lives.
9
The city of Zech has been moved to the east by a mile. The astrologers predicted a meteor would fall where it once stood, where the houses have left a deep indent in the ground, where the pressure of the people left a hollow in the earth. And the people carried up their beams and bricks and worldly possessions, pried the cobbles from the mud and wrapped every pane of glass from the church in thick cloths, and built their homes again beside the same hated neighbour on the same street, and they called it Zech again. But Zech was the grave where the grass never grew back right and the meteor never fell, and New Zech was never quite home again.
10
A few miles tramping down a twisting road, the pink glow of the walls of Averacgh at sunset come glowing and gleaming; from the gates, as the moons come gleaming into view like two icy eyes, the dead come walking. Drab peoples with their possessions and thoughts and minds strapped to their backs, mindlessly slogging down the road. The mourners are hanging from the pink walls, watching their dead stumble away.
And in the morning, if you stayed, you might see travellers like yourself come walking up the road and the mourners greeting them with open arms and soft kissing mouths, just as the sun turns the walls of Averacgh that pink again.
“Is this your son,” you might ask, “the one you mourned last night?”
And the father would take his son’s face in his hands, palms cupping his cheeks, and say, “This is him. My son.”
And you would know the homes in the son’s eyes had been built one mile to the east.
*
“And in Averacgh, when you and your brothers came marching, did more dead than usual leave the gates that evening?”
The Commander has taken off his bucket. “How are your hurts?”
“The same as they always are and always will be,” says the General, and this notion does not seem to hurt him. He does not look frail sitting in that chair with his hands crossed in his lap, but he looks pained. “How many brothers died, Cody?”
“So you can send for another, with a soul one mile to the east?”
Obi-Wan bows his head, and now he does look frail. Frail and weary and sad. Like a man who has lost the will to keep moving through an ever changing labyrinth, and Cody wants to tell him about a city just like that, but—
“Will it be the same until I have seen every city in the galaxy, with you a hologram on my wrist? Every city almost the same, marked by the same signs, with the same dead, with the same men at the tops of the towers and the same men in the dirt? Water and blood and always the sound of the guns?”
“But you are not the sounds of the guns,” says Obi-Wan, “and neither are your brothers, and neither am I. And if there is good here on this ship, than the rest of the galaxy cannot all be guns either.”
“You hurt every day but still believe the whole world is not aflame?”
Obi-Wan smiles at him. “I shall make you another cup of tea.”
“I don’t think one cup of tea will put it all out,” he says, smiling wryly.
“We can try.”