The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [8]
Beckett took a long look around his room, his eyes glancing off the dusty outlines on his walls and floor where he’d had to sell his things—furniture, kirliotypes, awards, anything that he could—to scrape enough money together for more veneine. There was very little left. It was not comfort, but a cold, wry cynicism that told him at least he wouldn’t leave behind a lot of bric-a-brac for someone to sort through when the fades finally got to him.
Long-standing city ordinance in Trowth demanded that all statues, plaques, sculptures and public metalwork in the city be made of bronze. An apocryphal story claimed that this was at the behest of the Emperor Agon VII Czarnecki, whose hatred of all things having to do with the neighboring nation of Sar-Sarpek had caused him to forbid any artwork made from marble. Since bronze was the only other reasonable material with which to make public sculpture, and since Imperial decrees are notoriously difficult to rescind, bronze became the official accent of Trowth.
Unfortunately, the city’s harsh winters and salty sea-air turned bronze black and green almost immediately. Not one statue ever survived a Trowth winter without becoming almost completely unidentifiable. And there were plenty of statues. The statues that adorned the squares and courtyards, that stood in front of the towers in Ministry, or in front of the fancy homes in Beacon Hill had become an expanded front for the Architecture War.
The Families of Trowth had great enthusiasm for honoring their heroes, but much less enthusiasm when it came to preserving the memories of those heroes. They had been erecting statues for hundreds of years, in honor of this general or that scientist, sometimes more than once. Poor record-keeping on behalf of the Daior-Crabtrees had caused them to commission no fewer than fifteen statues in honor of Chretien Daior-Crabtree’s discovery of the fluxion salt, and over twenty statues in honor of Janusz Vlytze’s victory at the Siege of Canth, despite Vlytze’s dubious status as a hero of the Sar-Sarpek nobility. This was not altogether uncommon, as most of the Families of Trowth had been at least second-cousins with the massacred aristocracy of Sar-Sarpek, and to be cousins with Janusz Vlytze, who had led the immortal Last Ride of the Saaghyari, was an enviable privilege.
Being cast in bronze was by no means a ticket to immortality in Trowth. The constant feuding between the Families meant that the creation of new statues always received priority over the maintenance of old ones. Trowth was a city full of worn, green memorials, hundreds of thousands of faceless sentinels, standing guard over forgotten honors.
One such statue stood in the center of Queen’s Riot Close, which was a small courtyard off of Westbridge Street. Queen’s Riot was bordered by small town houses which were generally let out to reliable but poorly-paid civil servants like Beckett. The tall green-bronze figure in the center of the Close was pointing off to the east, its face and clothing eaten away by years of salty winter weather. It stood on a pedestal upon which someone had thoughtfully mounted a plaque, explaining who the eastward-pointing hero was and, perhaps, why he was pointing. Sadly, the plaque had also been eaten away by time and was completely illegible. Beckett called the statue Cuthbert, because it suited him to do so.
“Another ole’ morning, Cuthbert,” Beckett said, as he stepped into the cold gray winter air. Snow