The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [10]
The stench of Nowy Solum grew to a palpable thing, an unavoidable miasma: not just the stench of shit, but of congealed blood from countless animals being slaughtered in the alleys and streets, for sale in the many markets, which were already open and bustling. Meat roasted over a thousand cooking fires.
Offal of the slaughtered was left, rife with maggots, to rot in the gutters.
This, too, the kholics cleaned, though some was eaten on the spot. Most they took back to the kitchens of the ostracon.
This was a time of illness and fevers. People died each day, on dry land, far from the ocean, with water filling their lungs. More would be taken today. There were poxes, skin rots, inexplicable swellings. There were possessions and infestations. Only half of the babies born in the city survived their first week, and a further percentage of these—careful numbers were kept in crabbed handwriting, in the chamberlain’s ledger—got tattooed by the physickers, marked for the black humours that flowed from their spleens.
Shouts were heard from barkers at New Market, and from those at Horse Fair, joining cries from Soaper’s and Candles.
At a temple abandoned by its congregation and main sponsor, Tiamat—the goddess who once promised to keep pestilence at bay, and whose body now lay dead in the great desert—bells tolled. A tenant there tended to his flock of poor and displaced.
Screams pierced Fat Man’s Alley.
From the barracks at the foot of Jesthe, palatinate officers set out to make rounds. They were to visit the slums near South Gate, and so carried sacks to be filled with a variety of impoverished goods, taken in lieu of coin.
In the centrum, under the leaning palace, a line-up formed at the main well for bowls of water. There was a fight. The line-up extended all the way down the Street of Horses, lost finally under the houses that pressed up together, as if leaning in for a better look.
Before too long, most narrow streets and alleys—relatively still overnight—were busy. Prostitutes, bleary eyed and strung out, dreamed of sleeping for a fortnight, alone. Noblemen and labourers alike arose to knuckle their eyes. Underfed children kneeled, begging on corners.
Women shopped and gossiped.
A squalling child was born; an old lady clutched her robes and died, on her feet.
Kholics cleaned.
From everywhere, people emerged: from inside the structures, from underneath, climbing about on top.
The heat of another stagnant day grew and grew, trapped under thick, eternal cover.
And, in her bedchambers, buried within the rundown palace known as Jesthe, the chatelaine of Nowy Solum came awake, very hung over, to a pounding at her door.
Where the sun had not yet risen, icy mountains cragged. The River Crane was born in these remote glaciers. Past the mountains, the ocean extended outward, to plunge over the edge of the world and roil there, in the great abyss.
And, above the clouds, a man known as padre hornblower lifted his wooden horn to live up to his name. Hornblower also abided in a city of sorts—settlement, perhaps, would be a better term—but where he lived was not massive, nor congested, nor even built upon solid land: hornblower and his people had constructed their handful of huts high in the branches of a massive tree, a tree so tall it pierced the mantle of the world to brush against open skies.
The blast of hornblower’s horn had been clear and loud and continued to reverberate his finely tuned tympanums. He felt a swelling of pride. Sniffing at the breezes, hornblower understood that his body was filled with potency and the strengths of his position. All was as it should be. He felt good. Cradling the horn, hornblower hardened his face and scanned the small crowd gathered on the branch before him,