The City of Woven Streets

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I have not yet had time to get used to the light, when I am gripped by my upper arms and wrenched through the doorway. Someone larger than myself steps behind me and captures my wrists in a severe grip. The glow-glass slips from my belt and breaks on the floor. I see flames reflected in the water spreading into a pool at my feet. I try to tear myself free, but I realize I am shivering, and all my limbs feel as fragile as empty husks.

I begin to see the shape of the room at which I have arrived. There are no windows. Instead, a large fireplace is blazing on each of the four walls. Their burn emanates onto my skin, but the chill of the passage still smoulders in my bones. This is how cold the dead are, I think, when nothing moves in them any more. When all has stopped and nothing will ever change again.

The only piece of furniture is a table with a skein of rope on it. A man stands in front of one of the fireplaces, his back turned to me. He picks up a coal poker and trims the fire with it. A cloud of sparks bursts into the air and withers in front of the fireplace like a swarm of dead insects.

The man turns to me. He does not put the poker down. I recognize his City Guard uniform only a moment before I recognize his face.

I cannot bring myself to make a sound. The words stick to my tongue. The spikes of the poker are knife-sharp. A voice speaks next to my ear.

‘The new arrival looks somewhat surprised,’ it says. ‘Would you agree, Captain Lazaro?’

‘You are undisputably correct, Captain Biros,’ Lazaro says.

He nods at Biros. The fingers around my wrists tighten their grip and Biros shoves me forward. I almost lose my balance. Words return to me.

‘Wait,’ I say. My voice moves coarse and taut in the room. ‘What is this place? Where am I?’

Lazaro gives a slight nod. Biros stops forcing me forward.

‘You will see soon enough,’ Lazaro says.

In my mind, I go through the underground route again. I look for doorways I might have missed, exits I may have passed. I find nothing. It is not impossible that there might have been a fork in the passage somewhere. I walked the last stretch in complete darkness. But Lazaro and Biros were expecting me. This means someone somewhere knew there was only one route and one destination. That I could only end up here, if I ended up anywhere at all.

Anyone who does not know the route would be wise to consider carefully whether to follow it, Weaver had said. Her hands on the table, untarnished from work. Her closed gaze, brushing the door in the corner just enough for me to notice.

‘Why am I here?’ I ask.

Lazaro places the tips of the poker onto the floor. He moves them sideways, just a little. The hard metal screeches against stone.

‘Orders from high places,’ he says and smiles, a sharp smile of fire-glow. ‘Would you like me to take over, Captain Biros?’

‘I am quite pleased with the way things are, Captain Lazaro,’ Biros says. ‘But maybe you could lend me a helping hand.’ I feel him bend my arms a little, so Lazaro can see my wrists.

‘With pleasure,’ Lazaro says.

He places the fire poker onto a stand in front of the fireplace and moves to the table. He picks up the skein of rope and begins to slowly unravel it as he walks closer. Biros is still holding my wrists, when Lazaro wraps several layers of rope around them and pulls it tight. The rope bites into my skin. Its fibre prickles.

‘Thank you, Captain Lazaro,’ Biros says.

‘The pleasure is all mine, Captain Biros,’ Lazaro says. ‘Are we ready?’

‘All ready,’ Biros replies.

He pushes me towards the door in the corner between two of the fireplaces. It is difficult for me to turn to look while I stumble across the room, but I can feel Lazaro’s eyes following me. When Biros stops me to open the door, I turn my head far enough that my neck hurts. I speak over my shoulder into the room.

‘Where is Valeria?’

Lazaro’s face twitches, but he remains silent. Biros pushes me to move. The door is open now. Biros’s mouth is so close to my ear that I feel his breath on my skin. A shudder runs through me. I try to suffocate it. He shoves me into the faintly lit corridor. The door closes behind us. We begin the long climb up stairways. He is too close behind me on every step.

Cold settles around me again now that the fires are left behind. The corridors are bare, windowless, and the walls are close. They catch the echoes of our footsteps and cast them into the surrounding silence. Torches paint quivering spheres of light along the way, and between them the dark crawls onto the skin. We stop several times to pass through locked gates. Biros has a key to every one of them. I feel like I am walking towards the centre of a maze that keeps moving further away. Biros does not talk to me during the journey, but his grip of my arms feels forged from metal and the points of his boots hit my heels repeatedly. Intentionally or not, I do not know. He would not hesitate to hurt me if I tried to escape. And where would I run? A stretch of corridor between two locked, barred gates would not take me far.

Eventually we turn to a corridor at the end of which stands a guard dressed in a uniform that carries the sun emblem of the Council. I am surprised to see that she is a woman. The City Guard does not allow women to join. A long whip with a thick handle is hanging from her belt.

‘This is her, then,’ the guard says.

‘Yes,’ Biros replies. ‘I trust you know what to do with her.’

The guard regards me, her face impassive.

‘The instructions were clear,’ she says.

‘She is yours,’ Biros says.

The guard-woman nods. Biros steps back. The guard takes my arm and opens the door. It is thick and makes a metallic sound.

‘We do not have all night,’ she says.

I walk through, listening to Biros’s footsteps behind me. They do not follow.

The next corridor opens wider. We walk past several closed doors with only a small hole at eye level. I see nothing but unmoving dusk behind the holes. Behind one door there is a tense, stretching sound. Like someone pulling a narrow string tight, or moaning.

‘Keep your gaze turned ahead,’ the guard-woman orders.

We climb one more flight of stairs. Behind yet another gate a smell pushes against us that is not very different from the House of Webs, only denser. It is the odour of people and bodies. Here, a strong stench of drainage blends with it. I breathe through my mouth so I cannot smell it.

The cells only have bars instead of solid doors. I catch glimpses as we walk past. Some of their inhabitants are lying on plain bunks. Others are curled up in the corners, either sitting or lying on the floor, face buried in hands. I realize most of them are probably trying to sleep. Everything is lit by glow-glass pipes along the corridor. The guard pokes at me to walk on. She stops near the end of the corridor, opens the door of an empty shell and begins to loosen the rope around my wrists. She yanks the rope off and pushes me in. The key creaks in the lock.

‘Your number is 505,’ the guard says.

‘Wait,’ I say. ‘What is happening? Where am I?’

The guard is silent. She pushes the key into her pocket and leaves. I hear her footsteps draw further away in the corridor.

I stand beside the bars. I see the prisoner in the opposite cell get up from the corner, walk to the bars and push her face against them. Finally I understand where I am.

The tattoo is clear in the middle of her forehead.

The mark of the Tainted.

A loud bell begins to clang. I have not slept a wink. I ache all over, my neck and back are stiff from lying on the hard bunk and my throat feels like I have tried to swallow shards of glass. I am still cold. The clanking of the bell is followed by rustling and whimpering in the cells. Heavy footsteps enter the corridors, and there are creaks and clangs as the doors are opened. When the light changes, I think for a moment there is a window somewhere and daylight, but then I realize the guards have brought torches with them.

Eventually, a bored-looking guard appears outside my barred door. She lets me out and orders me to join the queue. There are another twenty or so prisoners already standing in it, herded by three other guards.

‘Move!’ one of them shouts.

I look around in the dining hall. There are maybe a couple of hundred people sitting at the long tables. They are all girls and women. My eyes fall on a girl who looks familiar. I realize it is Mirea: the ten-year-old weaver who was taken from the House of Webs a few months earlier because of her night-maere. The tattoo on her forehead is still fresh, its lines sharp. The wrists revealed by the too-short sleeves are narrow as fish-backs. She does not see me. Like most prisoners, she is staring at the thin porridge on her plate without looking around.

Next to me, an older woman whose hair is woven into a long, white braid gives me a glare. I turn my gaze to the porridge, but cannot help noticing that her hands are covered in scabs. The skin of the fingers looks like it has broken and grown back repeatedly without ever having time to heal properly. There are long, lighter scratches running across the backs of her brown hands. A woman sits opposite who cannot be much older than me. The skin of her hands, too, looks broken and only half-healed.

I let my gaze slide along the surface of the table and see that everyone’s hands are scarred and scabby, even those of the very youngest. In addition to this, many have visible patches of rash on their faces and arms.

I do not see Valeria. Apart from Mirea, I also do not see any of the weavers the City Guard took away from the House of Webs because of dream-plague.

There is still porridge on my plate when the clanging of the bell begins again. Everyone gets up and forms a long line. A guard opens the door, and the prisoners begin to march out of the dining hall. I join the line and follow the others, worried that I will do something wrong. The guards keep their hands close to their whips.

I notice that it is not only the prisoners who carry the tattoo of the House of the Tainted on their foreheads; a few guards do, too.

The line walks into a long and narrow room with pigeonholes on the walls. Everyone seems to have their own. Women around me begin to undress and put on the garments folded on the pigeonhole shelves.

I stand at the centre of the room, not knowing what to do.

‘Excuse me,’ I say to a middle-aged woman covered in dark moles who is changing next to me. ‘I’m new. I don’t have a pigeonhole.’

The woman looks at me, expressionless, and then inclines her head towards the nearest guard. Uncertainly I approach the guard. She wears a house-tattoo on her forehead, already slightly faded and blurred on the edges, although she looks like she cannot be older than thirty years. She must have lived in the house since she was a child. I conclude she must be a woman, because I have not seen any male guards. Yet her build is angular in a robust way, and her face looks sexless. Her short-trimmed hair barely shows from under the guard’s cap. There is a strange familiarity about her face, but I am unable to place it.

‘Excuse me,’ I say. ‘I don’t have a pigeonhole.’

The guard turns to look at me. Her expression is not kind, but it is not threatening, either. Her eyes fall on my forehead.

‘You are new, are you not?’

Her voice is low. I nod.

‘What is your number?’

‘505,’ I say.

‘Follow me,’ the guard orders.

I walk after her to the back of the room, where she unlocks a cupboard and pulls out a set of garments, which she hands to me.

‘If it is so big it falls off or so small you cannot fit in it, ask for another one,’ she says. ‘Preferably ask me.’ She locks the cupboard. ‘There are some unused pigeonholes at this end.’

She nods towards an empty pigeonhole with no one standing next to it. I thank her.

The others have already changed and are shivering in short trousers that end above the knee and in sleeveless, loose tops. Even in summer, the outfit would be unusual. At this time of the year, it is a mere undergarment.

‘No loitering!’ a guard shouts from the other end of the room. I realize she means me. Quickly I tear off my layers of clothing and put on the outfit that provides no warmth. I barely have time to push my own clothes into the pigeonhole, when the line is already moving out of the changing room. I wrap my arms around myself and follow.

‘Hands on the sides!’ the guard shouts. I straighten my arms and notice their hair standing up.

I recognize the place where we are taken along stairs and corridors. Last time I looked at it was from the other side: the old, secluded harbour where spectres pass and vanish without a trace, visitors from the land of dreams and death. Now I am one of the spectres. From this side I see the city that does not look back, because I no longer exist under its gaze. None of us do.

We are marched onto ships, packed below the deck. I smell sweat and the sea, the dirt and humidity inside the ship.

The hold is divided by rails running across it. Some prisoners slump down to sit or squat in the corners. Others stand. There is little light. Only a few glow-glasses hang in the corners. I thread my way to the edge of the crowd. There are no guards down in the hold, but one of them comes to see us at repeated intervals.

When the guard is not around to hear, a faint chatter grows to surround me. No one talks loudly, and no one talks to me. I look for Mirea. Eventually I see her leaning on a curved wall near the back of the hold. Slowly I start moving towards her. The sea is not harsh, but I am not used to the swaying floor under my feet, and I need to hold on to the rail so as not to lose my balance.

There is an empty space next to Mirea where I settle. She does not look at me.

‘Hey,’ I say.

Mirea does not seem to hear. Her face is pale, almost blue in the dusk of the hold. The bones of her cheeks jut out from under her skin. She says nothing.

‘Do you remember me?’ I ask. I keep my voice low.

Mirea turns to look at me, surprised that someone has spoken to her. I see a slow recognition on her face, but not the slightest delight.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You let them take me.’

I remember her tears in the dusk of the dormitory, the distress in her expression, when she understood. My chest tightens.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I was afraid. That they would take me too, if I tried to help.’

Mirea stares at me, her eyes cold.

‘And they did,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘They did.’

Not the same way they took you, I think, but adding that would be meaningless. The outcome is the same.

‘Good,’ Mirea says and turns her face away from me. She stares ahead, into the shadows at the low end of the hold.

I have nothing to say to that. We listen to the roll of the waves and the creaking of the wood.

Eventually I break the silence.

‘I know you’re mad at me,’ I say. ‘And I deserve it. But I’d like to ask you something.’

Mirea continues to stare ahead of her without looking at me. Her breath flows back and forth. Her ankles are no thicker than a few of my fingers together. They are covered in purple rash.

‘Ask,’ she says.

‘Where are they taking us?’ I ask.

‘To work,’ Mirea says.

I look around. I find it hard to imagine what kind of work we can do in the cold of winter in our underwear.

‘What kind of work?’

‘You will see,’ Mirea says.

She still does not wish to talk to me. I cannot blame her. In her place I would probably have got to my feet and sought somewhere else to sit.

Mirea’s narrow fingers scratch her instep. The sound of the waves rises and falls ceaselessly.

‘But it doesn’t kill you,’ she adds after a long pause.

‘What doesn’t?’

‘The work,’ she says.

I nod. I am not certain if she sees it, because she still stubbornly refuses to look at me.

‘I have another question,’ I say.

Mirea does not respond. I do not take it for assent, but neither for rejection.

‘Have any others arrived lately, or am I the only new one?’

Mirea’s gaze circles the dusky space.

‘503 came last week,’ she says. ‘The grey-haired one sitting by the opposite wall. About midway.’

I look. A woman is squatting on the floorboards with her gaze turned inward, palms pressed together. Her lips move soundlessly. Maybe she is talking to Our Lady of Weaving. The tattoo on her wrinkled face is red-edged and fresh.

‘Is she the only one?’ I ask.

‘Another one arrived yesterday. 504,’ Mirea replies. ‘She’s maybe as old as you. Or maybe a little older.’

I have looked around so many times I am certain I would have seen Valeria if she was in the hold. Yet hope rises in me, light and heavy at once.

‘What does she look like?’ I ask. ‘Is she here?’

‘Next to the hatch,’ Mirea says. ‘Black hair, a little shorter than you.’

I look and I see the girl whose curly hair has fallen to cover her forehead. She notices me looking and rolls her eyes. Embarrassed, I turn my gaze away.

‘Are all prisoners brought here to work?’ I ask. ‘Or is there another place where prisoners are kept?’

‘There’s a later shift,’ Mirea says. ‘They eat after us, and their ships go to a different place.’ This knowledge makes me feel a little better. Perhaps Valeria is in the house after all. The second shift also explains why I have not seen any of the others taken from the House of Webs. ‘And there is the men’s side, but I have never seen them,’ Mirea continues. ‘And then there’s the solitary confinement. Sometimes the new ones are taken directly there.’

I remember the dense, thick doors past which the guard walked me, their small peekholes. I nod.

The hatch opens and a guard looks in. The chatter is cut short.

After the guard has gone, Mirea says, ‘If you want to talk again, don’t do it anywhere but here. Talking gets you in trouble.’

She moves away from me and joins a group standing by the opposite wall, where someone is telling a story. I only hear stray words of it. I look at them laugh, but do not know what it is at.

The journey is long. The rocking of the ship makes me nauseated. It is difficult to estimate the passage of time in the hold, but when we are ordered to the deck, I can see from the angle of light that the morning has turned to day. The ship is anchored near a cluster of islets scattered in the sea as if by a giant’s hand. The nearest islands are small mounds on the horizon, and I cannot see the tall buildings of the city on them. Then again, I do not know if they would be visible from this distance; I have never been so far from the island before.

I begin to understand what is happening when the prisoners begin to line up behind daises next to the ship’s rail. There are only enough of them for about twenty at a time. The rest of us remain in queues behind them. A cold wind sweeps the deck. My teeth clatter and my stomach churns.

We are all given light, tight-woven baskets. I watch the others tie theirs to their waists and do the same. One of the guards rings a bronze bell hanging from a hook and turns an hourglass. The sand begins to measure time. The first prisoners dive into the sea from the daises. I now understand the meaning of the garments: the outfits are light so they will not hinder swimming. But at this time of the year the seawater is cold as frozen glass.

The waves fold and spit salt into the air. A seagull takes wing from an islet of rock. Every hair on my skin stands sharp, like a bristle. The first divers surface. One or two of them are holding something white in their hands, like branches paled by a silver-burning sun.

Bone coral.

For a moment I am perplexed. There is bone coral everywhere on the island: in the amulets people wear around their necks, and hanging over doorways to keep night-maeres away, and in the buttons we sew on our garments. Great amounts of it wash onto the shores every month. Why would we be sent to gather it from faraway waters?

The women throw the branches into a small boat floating on the waves that is tied to the ship with a rope. They pull out more from the baskets tied to their waists.

‘Wrong colour!’ one of the guards shouts. ‘The white ones are worth nothing.’

‘This is all there is,’ one of the women shouts back.

‘Keep looking,’ the guard shouts. ‘There is sand in the hourglass yet.’

I understand then. It is not bone coral we are expected to find, but blood coral. The Ink Quarters have ground it into red-dye and ships have carried it to faraway lands throughout my lifetime. I have always imagined the seafloor thick with forests of it, only waiting to be thinned so they could grow back.

The prisoners draw a deep breath and vanish underwater again.

I am next in line. From the corner of my eye I catch glimpses of the sand flowing towards the moment when I will have to cast myself into the sea. The divers keep springing to the surface and throwing their modest catches into the boat. I notice them glancing at each other, clearly hoping that someone might have found a coral haul of which they could have their share.

The sand flows to an end. The bell begins to clang. The prisoner who jumped into the sea ahead of me comes back to the surface. Her lips are colourless. Her hands are empty.

The guards throw the rope ladder into the sea, and the divers climb on board, shivering with cold. One of the guards, the same I spoke to earlier, begins handing them blankets they wrap themselves in as soon as they reach the deck. I decide to turn my thoughts towards that moment.

I step onto the dais. The other second-round divers jump into the water. My feet do not budge. My weight does not move. The water below furrows, grows teeth-like edges on its surface.

A harsh hand presses onto my back and pushes.

My breath stops short from the blow of the collision and cold. I hit the water half-sideways, and the collision feels like a sore slap on my skin. I paddle up to the surface to breathe. The air is no warmer than the water.

‘You! Back!’ one of the guards shouts when she sees me. ‘There is no place for freeloaders on this vessel.’

I fill my lungs with air and try to keep moving so the chill wrapped around me will not paralyse me completely.

The sea encloses me, faint and soundless. I swim deeper and fumble with blind hands. My fingers meet sharp-edged stone and soft, slippery seaweed. Something slithers away from under my touch. Then I feel something hard and forked in my hand. I squeeze my fist around it and begin to kick my way to the surface.

My lungs seem to be running out of breath. I blow out air through my nose, and my chest aches with the need to breathe in. My head pierces the surface of the water and ripping-cold air flows into my lungs. The cold prickles my limbs. I look at the branch I am holding, and I nearly cry. It is only a tree branch covered in seaweed, probably from one of the stunted pines growing on the islets, low and twisted.

I place the branch on the water for the waves to claim.

The guards are throwing glances at me from the deck. All I can do is draw breath and dive again. This time I force my eyes open under water. I have little hope of finding coral; with my eyes closed, I have none. I need to blink, because the salt stings. Everything is blurred.

Slowly I begin to discern shapes: the dark, oblong form of the ship behind me, the ridges sloping into the sea from the islets until they open into cliffs and deep caves. I need to return to the surface to breathe again. Yet I am almost certain about one thing already. The blood coral, if there is any, grows in the caves and on the lower surfaces of the deep-reaching cliffs that are hard to get to.

I also realize now why divers are used for gathering the coral. The gathering devices of the coral ships are four-branched, slightly bigger than anchors. But if blood coral now only grows in places where the device does not reach, in nooks and crannies requiring precision, hidden in the folds of rock, then only human hands will do.

During my next dive the assumption is strengthened. Most others head directly for the dark holes in the rock and the undersides of the cliffs so deep that I have no courage to try to swim to them. There is porous reef visible on the stone ridges, but when I swim closer and try the surface with my hand, I notice that it has probably not grown for years. There are few branches, and those are simply short, death-white stubs. Worth nothing. My hand raises a rust-coloured cloud of sediment into a slow movement from the reef.

I no longer know how many times I have dived. I know I will not be able to do it many more times. Feeling is vanishing from my hands and feet. The cold only cuts occasionally now. Just as I am ready to sink into water again, the bell begins to clang and the rope ladder is lowered. I find it difficult to move my body, to pull my own weight up the side of the ship. My fingers slip off the rope. I look at them in confusion. They simply no longer obey my order to hold on. Sea-floor sediment clings to my skin. A guard grasps my wrist and drags me over the rail with a pained look on her face. My legs give in when I reach the deck. A blanket is wrapped around me and a mug of hot, faintly herbal-smelling water is placed in my hand.

I hear the splashes as I am being herded into the cabin close to the brazier. I think of the sand pouring in the hourglass unstopping, and I wait, my heart colder than anything else.

I shiver in the cabin, and the warmth of the brazier is nothing more than a puff of breath on one’s skin on a chilly day, only warming for a moment and leaving an even deeper cold behind. I see the short-haired guard look at me and say something to another guard. The other one shrugs without looking at me.

The ship does not head back to the island until dusk.

Back in my cell I am still shivering. Although I have been allowed to change into dry clothes and eat a meagre evening soup, the blanket around me feels thin and my bones have turned into ice. Broken glass sinks deeper into my throat every time I swallow, and my breath does not want to flow. I close my eyes and try to sleep, but it is too cold. I shiver in a drowse where I lose my sense of time.

My spirit sends me wandering in the stony maze of the House of the Tainted, behind the closed doors. I place my hand on the surface of each door to sense if Valeria is on the other side. I whisper into the opening on every door to call her to me, but she does not come.

Much later a burning eye appears in the half-dark. Looking at it makes my eyes hurt. I try to remain in the small, stiff coil into which I have curled, but I am pulled off my bunk. I try to speak, but only whingeing and wheezing comes from my mouth. The scorching eye glows in front of me all the way along the corridor. In the pupil I see the sun flaring on top of the Tower, staring back at me, red and ready to burn the world into ashes. I want to throw the Tower off its roots, sprain the bones of the earth underneath, but that power I do not hold. I want to tear down the stone sun, but it is too far above. The sides of the Tower are smooth and without foothold, and the stones below spread hard and merciless in all directions.