The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [27]
But this traveller had lived in Nowy Solum. Had lived there for some time. He described all manner of people and creatures, pushed together in the thronging streets, for better or worse. Anything, the salesman said, could happen there. A man could die in his tracks and be stepped over by all that passed by, or a man could grow rich beyond his dreams. There was food, so much food: fish from the distant ocean, and herbs and roots and spices, giving out such scents as they simmered that they could transport anyone who breathed them. Jewellery. And women, too, like you could never imagine. (Pardon me ma’am.)
Physickers and splicers created life with their own two hands almost as easy as they might remove it. A palace, and a beautiful young chatelaine. Officers, without gods to lead them, and fecund monsters hiding in underground caverns.
Exemplars of the gods had once led congregations there, swallowing their host, or touched by the light of the deities.
Touched by gods.
Path’s forehead throbbed.
The smell of the cheroot stung his sinuses.
He saw scars on the man’s face and the way the salesman stared at his mother—lusty, through half-closed eyes.
At the time, path could retain nothing, had no framework on which to hang these stories, no references. He had imagined, as the days passed, that the words and images had been devices, illusions meant to impress his mother, who was very much alive then, and still plump, human, and warm (though by no means could she ever have been considered beautiful, like the chatelaine the man mentioned).
Path had also seen the way his mother silently regarded the salesman as he spoke, peering from her shadowed corner of the living area: like a shrike watching a mouse.
But the salesman finally did leave, unscathed, without a sale and, because his father had managed to stay awake the entire time, without his mother’s full attentions. Path’s mother, therefore, was in a foul mood when the door finally closed. No one ever really knew or cared that the boy had lain there, listening, first to the fabulous stories, then to the argument, then to the sounds of fists striking flesh. Familiar cries filled the hovel: pain, and frustration, and the isolation of their parents’ desiccated lives.
Drooling, an idiot, path lay on his shelf.
Yes. These were the memories that could come back now. He would need to be careful.
Temples, path thought. And being touched by the light of the gods.
Could his father recall these events, the salesman? Preoccupied, brooding over the curse that was his progeny, no doubt his father did not remember the encounter, or the fight with his now departed wife.
They continued along the road, which became more and more defined—more and more like a road with each step—both of them aware that Nowy Solum had called to them, and that the city was, and possibly had always been, their destination.
Beyond the vaulted stone ceiling of the grotto, where Name of the Sun’s eyes had earlier failed to discern anything of note, and where the liberated cherub soon came to roost; beyond the stalagmites and lime deposits and the blind white cave beetles that fed on the guano of blind white bats, was a corridor, and a series of holding cells, used for prisoners of castellan and chatelaine alike, throughout the ages. There were four cells. Currently, three were empty, sealed, and had been this way for centuries. The fourth was occupied.
Forever ajar, hinges crusted with buboes of rust, wood gone soft and black and pulpy, the door was a swollen affair. Dank vegetation from inside the cell spilled out through the narrow opening and, in many places, through the rotten wood itself, to die there, in the