The Broken House Read online

  Working with same patience and commercial flair, the Company had also become the City’s largest landlord, disposing of an abundance and variety of rentable spaces. Many of these were in the walls themselves. Towers and bastions, gatehouses and the guardrooms above the lesser gates, foundries and armories, machine shops and hangars, depots and dumps, all these found tenants. But the Company ran its own enterprises. It had converted an outlying kastron into a stylish hotel and ran it with great success. Walls’ builder’s yards supplied the contractors of the City. And then the ramparts were honeycombed with chambers of every description. The Company ran coffeehouses and wineshops in the old smithies and laundries; had turned the paintshop into a cluster of boutiques; ran a gamingroom in the Explosives Factory, a dancehall in the stables. For as long as motion pictures had been made, the Company provided stages, lights, and sets, and they still projected those brittle films in the Old Firing Range and supplied a small orchestra for the accompaniment. A complex of thick-walled magazines housed the brothel founded eighty years before and staffed by the prettier recruits to the Cooks’ Unit. The Motor Repair Shops serviced all the remaining vehicles in the City, fewer and wearier with every passing year, and its lots supplied parts from rusting staff-cars and gun-tractors. The wood-fired Army Baths were now open to the paying public.

  The girl led them through storerooms the size of dwellingblocks, down passages wider than avenues. Drytung trotted past doors emitting soapy steam, the fumes of roasting coffee, grinding shrieks and blue showers of sparks, the click of billiard balls. A world unto itself, really, all you could need, why leave the Wall? Her bare feet made no noise. Her toes were as long as a lizard’s. Drytung himself was marching with quick crisp steps, watching her straight back, while Root shambled in the rear, breathing noisily. “Stertorously.”

  Mold, mildew, acrid vapors, the small cold breath of animalcules colonizing stone in their millennial growths: their caustic exhalations caught in Root’s throat and flooded the cavities of his skull. His eyes stung and wept, his ears swelled till all sound came from within, his joints and organs and the fremitus of his impeded breathing. Root wiped water from his eyes and walked on. Cloaca. Infestation. He would not touch the wall, imagining wet alveolar tissue, pits and pendencies, weed ropy and gummed. He breathed shallowly, would not swallow but spat mucus out at the cracks and stumbled on.

  At the same time he could not help thinking about the theater. Theories were always coming to him about it, now that he had one—his own house, the Roohaneeya. After the Synod had cursed it and alienated it, he’d picked it up cheap. A temple it had been, under the Misprision, an appalling place where priestesses had sung their rites to the old goddesses. Where they recited odes, burned herbs, mounted men and taught them when to withhold and when to release, what cries to utter. But now it was his theater, a vast well whose walls and floor were riddled with corridors, passages, booths, aisles, besides the pit beneath the stage, the ladders to the galleries, the alleys between curtains where one walked crabwise, all marked with priestesses’ secretions, flakes of their skin, coils of their hair, drips of their candle-grease. His theater was not clean, not wholesome.

  Just as well. Here was his theory: theater rests upon the recognition of life going bad, spirit assailed by dust. Soul and venom meet in the flesh they’ve eaten into from opposite sides. Ah! His words were soul and venom, both flowed from his pen. The arena of tragic action must have a smell! Must emit an unsettling whiff, a sprouting of mortal odor. Ah! “The Theater As Cunt”! He could write a pamphlet that would set the Bros. Crow gabbling, clutching their shriveled parts hidden in laundered couplets.

  “I think too much of these things,” Root told himself, wiping his forehead. Ah, these things. What else had brought him here, to this ridiculous fate? He made his big feet slap the tunnel floor, hurrying after Drytung and the cook. It was the adnomiast’s word that had set his mind running in this track. “Cunt.” A slap to the soul. What was he doing? Going to war—he, Root? Then don’t think of priestesses; think of battle. The battlefield. “The Theater As Battlefield.” Ah! A solid theater: no interior spaces, packed with bodies opened, bodies grappling, blood flowing, unbounded, no, no secrets or hidden events. No stage or stalls, to see the play you pay: your life! Root chuckled at the idea. “The Solid Theater of War.” Another pamphlet to write—in private. Another bodyblow to the Bros. Crow! Root chuckled. The wine had warmed him, and the exercise. “Hurry up!” shouted Drytung. Their guide was marching through an archway into the bright blue day.

  3.

  The Domestic of Walls

  The Inner Curtain was beneath their feet, raising them to the viewpoint of angels and emperors. Massive, ancient; a column ten abreast could march there. Freshly washed, Drytung noted. A few damp patches lingered in the shade, and no gull had yet splashed a block. Long cannon, scoured to a gleam, overhung the bay. The wheels of their carriages had worn grooves in the pavement, and Drytung was interested to see similar grooves behind the gunports on the City side. Pennants flapped. The heavy old Imperial flag lazily spread itself, a square of scarlet, an emerald triangle representing Fna, the world-encircling mountain, boundary between this life and the other, only terminus to empire.

  The girl smiled. Drytung looked where she was looking, to a tower and, at its base, a figure in a white jacket.

  He was standing on a guncarriage, hands on a crenellation, leaning out into empty air. The Domestic of Walls did not look like a general to Drytung. He looked like a mushroom. From shoulders to haunches ran the wrinkles of a linen jacket, its pockets bulging, while a shapeless mushroom-colored hat spread its broad, wavy brim, from the shadow of which a long nose turned as they walked up. Then he moved and had hands, a telescope in one of them, and a smile opened beneath the hat as he climbed down.

  “I am enthralled,” he drawled. His voice had the Nahloon twang. No taller than Drytung, with feet as large as Root’s. His beard spread high up his cheeks, lustrous as an otter’s fell, and the hairs of his eyebrows poked left and right like whiskers. The eyes themselves were bright, dark, shrewd, alarmed, merry.

  “I was studying some bees,” he said and held up his spyglass. “They have nested,” he went on, “near the base of this tower, in a crevice. I noticed the parent hive a month ago, down in a man’s garden. They were getting crowded. Crawling outside, fanning their wings. I thought I could use them up here. The Wall gets sun all afternoon, and there’s every kind of wildflower they could want. Would you like a look? ’Nna will give you a hand up. This is ’Nna, one of our campfollowers and my cook.”

  Drytung was relieved to learn her name. ’Nna then helped him scramble on the cannon. Root got up too, and they leaned over the parapet. Far below, a grassy ditch spread between the Curtain’s thin shadow and an earthen berm covered in spikes of blue, red, yellow, and purple. The scent of sun-warmed lavender rose deliciously to Drytung’s nostrils, while Root took the telescope and screwed his eye to it. The brass tube searched, twitched, froze. “Aha! You see them? They will make excellent sentries!”

  Root watched the crevice in the Wall. The telescope was another tunnel, and at the end of it small bodies crawled in and out of a three-cornered hole, landing on the lip and crawling in, or crawling out and launching themselves, black and gold within a blur of wings. Root grew uneasy, thinking of vibrating bodies moving beneath the skin of the Wall, and passed the telescope to Drytung. “You don’t get honey, then?” he asked the Domestic. Shandimus’ eyes sparkled. “Oh yes we do. The crevice you saw isn’t the only way into that nest. We have a back door: an opening in the wall of the old stair that goes down to that sally-port. Once a tube ran out through it. It sprayed liquid fire—the old Imperial formula, lost now. We cut out the tanks and piping and put on a metal door. Whenever we like we open it up and reach in. A little smoke makes them sleepy. The comb’s in easy reach.”

  “Most ingenious,” muttered Root and climbed down.

  Drytung snorted. He had followed a
bee out from the nest, anticipating its veerings (sometimes quite wrongly) with the glass till the bee, if it was the same one, lit on a flower and pushed in, head and thorax. It was a powerful glass, of naval origin, Drytung fancied, part of the hoard of finely crafted old gear that had accumulated in the burrows of Walls, detritus of vanished armies and sunken fleets. He scrutinized flower after flower, and each had its bee. The flowers were commonplace, nothing he would have, although the meadowlike spread was pleasing, he granted, the dense mix of colors, the artlessness. Relieved from the burden of polite conversation, he searched the ditch and listened. Shandimus had made a jest, and Root laughed at it: Haff haff haaa. Was that hemp growing down there? Quite a sizeable patch, tall and spiky, female plants and bees all in and through them. That must add a kick to the honey, Drytung thought.

  “Every day, except when there’s important administrative business, of course, I am all in and through these walls and towers, matching needs to niches and niches to needs. I hardly ever go outside the walls. My family in Nahloon joke about it. They say they would see more of me if we built a spur of the ramparts around that side of the mountain.”

  Drytung expected another polite guffaw, but after a pause Root spoke with the resonance that betokened, Drytung recognized (that was wild mustard), the sprouting of an idea. “Domestic,” Root said, “when you say inside the walls, you don’t mean in the City, do you?”

  It was Shandimus who laughed. “No, I rarely go there and I rarely go out into the countryside either. I mean in the interior of the walls, yes. They go all around The City, you know. Even into it in places. I believe—it’s just a fancy of mine, not tested yet—that I could travel in a complete circle around the City. Without coming out.” Drytung studied the ditch; along the top of the berm grass had been pushed out by low-growing serpolet. He was disturbed.

  Walls are dividers. They keep the world out of the garden. They guarantee order and design, they are an emblem of these in the artful laying of stone on stone. They are not habitats—oh, lizards, beetles, a snake, spiders, no harm there. A swallow’s nest, he had one in the angle by his bamboo, flattering since it made his garden seem a peaceable place, safe haven. He heard some future voice say, “His wall harbored swallows.”

  Beasts don’t divide the world, but men do. To cultivate your cosmos, not within walls but inside the wall—well, is it all the same what lies on either side of it? Drytung rather had the idea that it was all the same to Shandimus.

  “I have often led squads through the walls,” the Domestic continued, his voice burring at the recollection. “Missions of extermination. Rats, mainly. Though once we came across a snake eight feet long. We stretched her out and measured her. The men called her Ramrod. They wanted to bring her back for our menagerie. But I ordered her left where she was. She was eating the rats. We visit her once or twice a year. Pick up her shed skins. Then we also find big bugs wherever the walls are damp. Huge hissing bugs. Then we fumigate.” He went on. Drytung let the spyglass fall from his eye and turned. A strategos of the Politics, commander of an ancient company: fumigating cockroaches, handling snakes, exterminating rats? Creeping through tunnels with a file of men, lugging a bucket with a spray-pump nozzle?

  “We bring a little wagon,” the man went on, as if guessing what was in Drytung’s mind, “with some gear. Lamps, poison, the smoke-engine, digging tools, cement. We make some holes and stop up others.” He grinned yellowly at this pathetic antithesis. “I carry a revolver. The rats are not always passive, particularly when cornered, and some are quite large.”

  “It can’t be easy, firing at a small target in a dim, enclosed space,” remarked Root, who seemed to be following this extraordinary disclosure with great interest. Drytung was not usually taller than Root (more than a head shorter). But from his elevation on the guncarriage he now noted the bald spot on his friend’s crown, a white flaky spot the size of a coin surrounded by a whorl of stiff, gingery hair.

  “I have trained my eye. Naturally the men stay well back.”

  ’Nna was squinting up at him, leaning back and shading her eyes with her hand. She suddenly stretched out her other hand, palm up (the palm three shades pinker than the back), as if to help him clamber down. But he did not know that he wanted to come down. Drytung hesitated. He did want to touch his palm to hers. Yet he was not an old man who needed help. He was twenty-four! (Root was twenty-eight and heavyset.) And yet again he was short and wearing shoes not designed for scrambling around gun-carriages, there was a three-foot drop from the lowest foothold, what if he slipped and landed on his arse? He took the proffered palm. (Soft, warm, communicative. Ridges of skin and striations of muscle slid across one another.) Lightly he stepped down.

  “You do not take your charge lightly, Domestic,” Root growled.

  “The walls are the City,” Shandimus simply replied.

  “How is that, Domestic?” Drytung had let go of the brown girl’s hand but stood beside her. Except for her cap, swollen with her hair, they were of a height. What a meaty lump Root was, peering down at Shandimus as he asked his question, and what enormous feet he had. Now Drytung’s feet were small, high-arched, delicate. The girl’s toes were really extraordinary, gripping the pavement almost like fingers, the second toe far longer than the great one, the others nearly as long as the second, even the little toe looked prehensile.

  “The City is human order and structure. It is mankind with every niche assigned. It is our providence in stone and mortar. We do not have places in the world, Kyr Root, beyond what we can improvise and then defend. But in the City we do have places. My place is as commander: the Domestic of Walls. You are my protostrator, you too have your place as a member of my staff. You must answer to my commands, and we both answer to the Sacellary, who serves the Despot (The God keep him safe!). There is here a hierarchy of service. The City bodies it forth in architecture by a formula of beauty, a gradient of delight. We want to live in nicer places, and we can. Where the hierarchy is embodied in a gradient, men can change their place orderly, not like animals, grimacing, clawing, goring, young males challenging the dominant male, not like that. No: we rise in the service. The new place is there already. Our providence has so clarified its intentions over the course of our history that it knows what we want before we do and supplies a niche to satisfy us. Even in the time of civil war, the War of Four Despots for example, anyone could look at the Palace and see that the City wished for one Despot, no more.”

  “’Rise in the service,’” murmured Root, and Drytung must admire his friend’s acumen (he always seized upon the interesting phrase) and tact (prompting while effacing himself, no wonder he was a good director).

  “Yes,” said Shandimus and stuck his dark beard out from the shadow of his deplorable hat, into the sunlight where it reflected deep red glints. Naked longing in that yes, Drytung thought. ’Nna suddenly spread her toes. He cocked an eye down at them: spread amazingly wide, as if to get a purchase on the flagstones. You could just about walk your fingers through the gaps without touching skin (brown, smooth, tight to the flesh).

  Root glanced at Drytung, who was studying his feet and listening, Root knew, with the sort of attention that would blossom later in a sharp comment. Well, this was interesting. “Gradient of delight” was quite a brilliant phrase. But was this man ambitious for delight?

  “The City allows a man to be someone,” the Domestic was saying. His lips moved energetically to shape the exact vowels of cultured discourse. He had worked to master them; Root knew what labor was involved. “The higher you rise, the more you are. The more fully you are, I mean. The places provided for those who rise are larger places, more delightful. Then the man expands.

  “You are a man of the theater, Kyr Root. You must understand something of what I am saying. I have been to your plays. Your actors personate men and women far larger than they.” That’s true. “You will tell me what tricks of mimicry and stagecraft allow them to create that illusion. But your words do ev
en more. The men and the women watching your play, hearing your words, do not see tricks but a grandeur, and, seeing it, do they not form an idea of the grandeur that might be theirs? Are they not delighted by such an idea? Do they not expand to meet it? Then your theater is a very large place, till the play ends, and the audience must jostle their way out a few small doors inconveniently placed, stepping on feet and knocking off hats, drawing curses and rough treatment in their turn. I come from a narrow, crowded world. My people are smallholders, farmers, almost peasants. You might call them peasants without great exaggeration. The land draws them into its every least fertile fold and crevice. It absorbs them. A shock of wheat can grow in the little pocket of dirt between two boulders. You plant a vine where sun and soil agree. You hive your bees where they can raid the neighbor’s orange grove. All focus and detail. Strategy: arrangements founded on the terror of the larger world. No walls against that world, nothing that will keep out tax-farmers, dragoons, religious zealots, sorcerers, lawyers, weevils, locusts, the mosquitoes that carry plague, the mites that kill bee-larvae. No walls, no expansion. And we were in the Nahloon! Just the other side of the mountain from the City!

  “My father left the farm to his brothers and entered the service. He was a skilled wood-carver, so he passed into Walls. Did you know that all the carousel-horses were carved and painted by my father? There once were six carousels operated by the Company, one in the plaza outside each of the major temples. Only one left now, and that runs only during Carnival, if the motor works. But I have those splendid horses stored where they won’t rot. They’ll be worth something, one day. He did well, my dad: rose to sergeant, made his pile in the victualing, bought me my commission, and then, when he retired, went back to the farm. He could not expand.