The Broken House Read online

  The Broken House

  book one of The Enchantments

  Tom La Farge

  Spuyten Duyvil

  Table of Contents

  The Broken House: book one of The Enchantments

  Part One: Walls

  1. The Pharos at Rhem

  2. The Inner Curtain

  3. The Domestic of Walls

  4. A Map of the Hook

  5. The Bee Wolf

  6. A Change of Strategy

  7. Night Reconnaissance

  8. How The Bits Fit

  9. The Spice Map

  10. The Shadow Line

  Part Two: Electrifying the City

  11. A Sudden Need for Copper

  12. Electrifying the City

  13. The Lamps Go On in Mole Place

  14. At The Kitchen Door

  15. The Illumination Dinner

  16. The Baby on the Bayonet

  Part Three: The Garden

  17. Memory and Anticipation

  18. The Answer

  19. The Battle in the Garden

  20. Time in the Garden

  21. The Summons

  Part Four: A Season of Dinners

  22. Blackening

  23. Galantine of Shadefish with Famine Chaud-froid

  24. Well and Stair

  25. Windows

  26. The Air Tart

  27. The Animal School

  28. Lhool in Her Mirror

  29. Allegory of Eel

  Part Five: The Nautomachy

  30. Desert Mother

  31. The Artificial Ocean

  32. The Cellar of Women

  33. War News, Society News

  34. Shandimus’ Offensive

  35. The First Half of Dunya

  36. The Old Shot Tower

  37. The Second Half of Dunya

  38. Good-bye

  Copyright information

  PART ONE

  WALLS

  1.

  The Pharos at Rhem

  Drytung stood at a casement. Behind him his friend Root slumped on a campstool staring at his hands. An officer was filling out forms: their military papers, his and Root’s, now that they were enlisting in the army to advance their literary careers. There were forms and files everywhere. The office was awash in papers, Drytung didn’t see how business could be done in such a mess. Drytung needed to see the grain of his table before he could write a word. One sheet of paper before him. One or two books lying open. The inkwell. The coffee-pot on its white column. The window open to the garden.

  The casement’s embrasure was six feet thick. At least six feet; Drytung himself was a little over five feet tall and reckoned he could lie in it at full length and grip the ledge with his fingers. Tunnel-like. Or funnel-like: it spread to a square of white mist, he could do nothing with that. It was a visual foghorn, a deadened blare of blank whiteness. Was this what army life was to be? The pointing of the ashlar was exact, he searched it for the least hint of moss, the army does not operate by intimations, there was no moss. Behind him Root sighed.

  A chair scraped suddenly. “Don’t get up, don’t get up, Adnomiast,” it was the Sacellary’s chuckle, and Drytung turned smiling to greet the upright lizard-faced old boy in the round glasses, smiling broadly, robes long and trimmed with the fur of glossy animals. “So, Drytung! Here you are too, Root (don’t get up), signing on for a tour of duty, eh? With the Ancient Company of Walls.”

  They uttered their gratitude, Drytung with elegant concision, Root in a strangled mutter. They were both doing it for the pension that the Sacellary had assured them they could not fail to receive from a grateful Despot, when they had handed in their satisfactory account of his expedition against Rhem. Enough money to stop schoolmastering, that was what Drytung was looking for. Root, he knew, had better reason than he to please the Despot. Root had been in a scrape, a bad one. This must rehabilitate him.

  “Thank you, I will sit for a moment. All those stairs! What happened to your lift?” The adnomiast explained at some length and with some heat. “Ah! And so, my dear Root and Drytung, here you are, military men!” And then for a while the conversation ran in a literary groove. The Sacellary knew everyone. In and out of the Academy, he had done favors for them all and so kept their sharp pens from stabbing at his master, the Despot. Who offered a broad target. For he was young, he was fat, he was fatuous too, and of the opinion that he was a brilliant architect and engineer. He had spent much of the treasure amassed by his skinflint mother in filling the City with edifices, whole districts of pesthouses, paupers’ wards, obelisks and cenotaphs, follies and bedlams, orphanages and bandstands, inoculation clinics, oratories, maisonettes for mutilated veterans and virtuous widows, homes for unwed mothers and wayward girls, menageries for live animals, and cabinets of wonder for pickled ones. All in a decorated style that Drytung did not like, found vulgar.

  And he had married an unimpressive debutante when he could have had Lakikia, the beautiful, refined, Lakikia V’Detsinya. But at the bridal competition his mother set up, the Despot had gone down the line of eligible girls, quizzing them on their accomplishments. Lakikia was a needlewoman and a gardener, though rivals said her gardens were too wild and her embroidery too plain. But her calligraphy and her letters in metric prose were beyond faultless, indeed were collected and copied. The Despot had paused before her and offered her the half of a distich to complete; which she had done, using his own words in a different order, and correcting the false quantity he had introduced in the meter. The Despot had scowled with a smile and a nod, and he had moved on.

  This story had not been forgotten, and two years later it was retailed with some animation when the Despot and Despina suffered their tragedy. For above the Palace, near the rim of the volcano on whose flanks the City was built, a shrine had anciently been set. Drytung could just remember the stone tank and the white eels that coiled there like flexible bones. In the days of the Misprision augurs had studied the figures of their twining, and infertile women had made offerings of hard-boiled eggs. After the coming of the true religion the eels had gone into the Metropolitan Aquarium. Two ancient eels were still coiling, and wives still ringed the tank, murmuring. The Despina had instructed the curopalates to let them be, unless they went further into outlawed rites. The pool had remained awhile, until the Despot’s heir had crawled up to it and plunged in. He was found by the servant sent to fetch wild honey for the Despina’s throat, hoarse with calling her little boy’s name. His eyes were open and his cheeks black.

  The Despot did not despair but managed his grief by expressing it in architecture; and now all the baths in the Palace were filled with water from the hot springs by pipes that were the source of perpetual leaks and floodings, as if the building wept. Everyone was concerned about the succession. The Despina, overwhelmed, did not look like getting pregnant again, and people had murmured about divorce and Lakikia. But she had gone back to the V’Detsinoy estate on the Hook and was never seen in town.

  Root was thought to have killed a child by poisoning its mother, his mistress at the time, while she was carrying it. She had died too, of course. Such at any rate was the rumor spread by Root’s rivals in the theater world, the odious Bros. Crow. Drytung did not believe a word of it. But, he thought, as light flashed from the Sacellary’s spectacles and teeth, the babies are doing badly, the old men are thriving.

  “Adnomiast, what about a taste of your excellent wine?”

  “Cunt!” bellowed the adnomiast, turning his head toward a door ajar behind him. Root stared, Drytung froze, the Sacellary heartily laughed.

  “Much to get used to in the army, eh?” he chuckled. “The epithet is, I believe, reserved by tradition for…”


  “…the Cook’s Unit, yes, Sacellary,” finished the adnomiast.

  “They do more than cook, though!”

  “Yes, sir. They are camp-followers. Besides cooking, their duties include laundering, sewing...”

  “…and whoring!”

  “Yes, sir. They service the troops in rotation.”

  A small woman was standing at the adnomiast’s elbow, eyes downcast. Her hair and figure were concealed by balloonings of brown cap, tunic, and trousers, except where a belt cinched her waist. Which for a soldier’s was absurdly small.

  “Wine and four glasses, cunt,” and she was gone, silently on long-toed feet, and back in an instant with a tray of hammered gold, a pitcher of hammered gold, four goblets of ripply crystal rimmed in gold. She filled these with garnet wine. Round face, richly colored skin, a hybrid evidently. As she bent to pour, the dark disc of her face made the adnomiast look pasty.

  The wines of Walls were legendary, the very flower of the Nahloon vintage. “Ha! You won’t get as good as this in the field!” snorted the Sacellary. “Will they?”

  “Not as good as this, sir, no,” replied the adnomiast, while the woman refilled their goblets, really a girl, Drytung could hardly detect a trace of breasts on her, even when she twisted in her tunic.

  “To the reduction of Rhem!” said the Sacellary, and they drank again. “And now a word to you two historiographers.” That was to be their work. They were to go to a war to record it, he and Root. “There is something you must grasp before I potter off. Adnomiast, you listen too. You all understand, do you, that this is to be an Imperial action?” Root looked confused; Drytung got it. It was this: the Despot did not in every matter of state insist upon the privileges of the emperors whose successor he legitimately was, by unbroken institutional continuity if not by lineage. There had not been an empire for a century and a half, yet the Despotate had never abandoned its claims to the territories it had lost. From time to time a Despot or Despina would feel the need to reassert imperial prerogatives. Then an Imperial protocol, visitation, chrysobull, even a military adventure was performed in such a way as to achieve, beyond the immediate goal, a more timeless sense of ceremoniousness. This would mean, Drytung knew, some outlay on spectacle, and his hopes for a comfortable pension rose as he sipped the excellent wine and watched the lithe grace of the little “cunt,” she could not be older than fifteen, and listened to the Sacellary.

  “Rhem is, you see, an Imperial city, an ancient foundation with a charter from one of the Demigods.” A dynasty from the Misprision had claimed this status. “The charter gives them certain rights and exemptions. The Despot wishes to remind them of their lofty past. Certain obligations, he feels, must accompany their privileges.”

  Root, frowning, raised his hand.

  “What is it, dear boy?”

  “This: why is the Despot mounting an expedition against one of his own cities?”

  The Sacellary sighed. “You may go,” the adnomiast told the girl, and she was gone.

  “They aren’t rebelling, are they?”

  “No, no. Not as such. But they won’t put out their light.”

  “Their light?”

  “The light in the pharos?” asked Drytung.

  “Exactly.”

  “But why should they? How does a lighthouse work without a light? Don’t they need it to prevent shipwrecks?”

  “Surely. But it has disturbed the Despot. It is his custom,” the Sacellary explained, “to climb the Last Stair at twilight. He sits by the old eel-tank where his little boy drowned. Prays for his soul and drinks a flask of wine. It is a sacred space, a platform for his meditations.

  “Even from that elevation you can’t see Rhem, of course. But you can see the light from its pharos. Quite bright, just on the horizon, far brighter than the stars. Among which the Despot feels certain his boy’s heroic soul has been enrolled. Now do you see?”

  Root looked incredulously at Drytung, who said, “Perhaps it might be suggested to him that it is the prince’s soul, brightest object in the sky.”

  The Sacellary shook his head. “Good, my dear Drytung, very good, a poet’s answer. But it won’t wash. I’ve already tried it. The light, you see, while brilliant, is too low.” And then he explained what Drytung should have known without asking: that in a despotate it is the despot who sets the symbols. “He ordered them to put it out. They refused. Well, Rhem is a fishing port. Its harbor is ringed with reefs and shoals and rocky islets; there’s just the one approach, and the fishermen return to port after dark.”

  Drytung had seen them. Once when school was out he had taken the packet to Rhem for a cheap vacation. He remembered a weatherworn, gull-haunted town with filthy streets; a damp house built around a court with a well and a lemon tree; a room with rush mats on the floor and a ceiling of cane laid across peeled branches. Outside, waves exploded around pitted brown rocks. A few battered islands and beyond them the bay and a sky spread with feathers of cloud. At dusk the fishing-boats sailed past with lanterns on their spars, patched and twisted craft but in silhouette like heroes’ ships painted on archaic jars. Gulls mobbed them, wheeling and diving for tossed guts, as hands prepared the catch for the women waiting to dicker across the gunwales.

  “Seems reasonable they’d want their light, then,” said Root, but the Sacellary shook his head again, and Drytung, always quick to apply a lesson, understood that in a despotate there is only one reason.

  “And so the Expeditionary Force must put it out. Now you two are accompanying this force as Imperial Historiographers.” Drytung’s expectations swelled: a handsome pension; perhaps a title! “You will record the events of this campaign, and the adnomiast will give you full access to orders, reports, charts, despatches, et cetera. You will write the Reduction of Rhem and reveal its Imperial dimension, smaller in scale than the epic gests of the Middle Empire, but equal, don’t you see, in implications.” And as dull Root did not yet seem to see what implications those were, the Sacellary added, “Order restored, my dear fellow. The balance redressed. Divine Justice: human action conforming to the cosmic harmony. A poet must value such matters as highly as a monarch, I think?”

  Drytung did. He was a gardener.

  “It may interest you to know that the Despot has planned a regatta to coincide with victory. A band will play gay and martial music, and a fleet of yachts, festooned with gay and martial banners, will sail out of the Pleasure Basin. The Despot himself, together with the Despina and the Oykies, will sail.” The Oykies were the monarch’s picked companions.

  “And now you will want to meet the Domestic Shandimus, who will command the Expedition Against Rhem. When you look upon him, see not merely the man of modest manners he always affects to be. No. See him as a Megaduke: a strategos of the Empire. Eh? Good lads. No no, I’m off, mustn’t stay any longer, my driver will fuss. My motor car idles with great labor!” he laughed. “Many thanks for the wine. I will think of you in the field.”

  All stood and bowed.

  “Cunt!” rapped out the adnomiast, though she was at his elbow. “Take away the tray and then escort these officers to the Domestic. Gentlemen, here are your commissions. You have the rank of protostrators in the Company of Walls. You will be shown where to draw your uniforms, insignia, and equipment, and where you will be billeted till we leave. Salute.”

  He said this so calmly that they thought it was a polite military formula of farewell; they were about to reply in kind when he repeated, “Salute!” with sterner emphasis. Root gaped, while Drytung slowly raised his hand to his eyebrow, imitating the gesture the adnomiast had greeted the Sacellary with. Root caught on and did the same.

  “A little more snap to it next time. Dismissed.” The adnomiast returned to his rolls.

  2.

  The Inner Curtain

  The little camp follower led them at a smart pace down a stone corridor. It was humid and dim. Late-morning light slanted from slits high in the wall, and Drytung re
ckoned they were traveling south. She strode through the shafts of dusty light, jaunty, swinging her arms. She had hips.

  Drytung noted a matching set of slits on the facing side, the west side if he had his directions right. They must be for firing through: arrows, musketballs, cartridges? A ledge ran under the line of them on either side. Drytung imagined sharpshooters. “Drawing a bead.” But how interesting: slits on both sides? This tunnel ran through the Inner Curtain, the chief defensive rampart. Firing-slits looking into the City? Drawing a bead on a citizen’s head? As if the wall were defending itself. As if it were itself a city—well, it very nearly was.

  Drytung knew his history. The Inner Curtain was the precinct of the Company of Walls. Of the five elite Politic Companies quartered in the City, Walls was the oldest and least in prestige. It had been founded in the Middle Empire to man the City’s ramparts, and over the centuries it had taken over the task of repairing them and building new ones. Then, as artillery brought down the usefulness of walls, it had been set to military engineering whenever the treasury was fit to stand such draining outlay. In time of war Walls supplied the sappers and conducted sieges. But the wars of the last century and a half, since the Empire’s latest, most definitive extinguishing, had been fast-paced affairs, sending small bands hurtling across the landscape, flaring in skirmishes whose combatants numbered in hundreds and casualties in dozens. There had been little call for the building of redoubts and ravenels or the digging of elaborate entrenchments. Walls had taken over the supply of the army and the repair of its motorized equipment. In peacetime Walls kept up the City’s walls, to repel water more than foes, and saw to the paving and even the cleaning of the streets and the upkeep of water mains and sewers. But it had branched into other areas on its own.

  Early in its history the Company had been granted hereditary smallholdings in the Vale of Nahloon on the volcano’s eastern flank. These little farms had survived intact, staying within the gift of the Domestic of Walls, and yielded much fruit and fine wine, as well as the famous honey. Whatever the Palace did not buy was sold to the other Politic corps, and in this way Walls maintained alliances and took over the quartermastering of the army, to their own profit.