The City of Woven Streets

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the Council is seated at a round stone table in the Tower, their mute faces turned towards each other and away from their crumbling surroundings; they sit without making a sound. A lizard runs across the table, turns swifter than water, is startled by the approaching footsteps at the door and disappears into a crack in the wall. Its tail wriggles on the table, twitching, prey caught in a web, until it comes to rest still, dark as a rock or the shadow of a rock.

The Council around the table does not pay attention to it, does not turn its gaze, does not say a word. Other creatures live in the cracks of the humid Tower too, they cross the room now and then. No one will raise a hand for just one.

The door opens and a servant carrying a torch steps in, bows in the direction of the table. He walks from one window to the next and kindles the torches on their racks outside the windows, the eyes of the Tower that watch the island when darkness falls. Before leaving the room he glances at the sea, sees what the Council does not.

A grey-gleaming torrent of rain falls from the clouds, lashes at the landscape, moves the waters and whips into movement the sediment clouds that rest as a heavy, rust-coloured ring where life is supposed to stir. The roots of the seabed and the bones of the earth stir, ready to sweep everything off the skin of the city: the towers reaching for the sky, tall and low rooftops, gondola-carrying cables, people’s thin lives. The dream-cliff stands silent amidst the waves and the movement of dream-threads still continues; it is ever stronger, it unravels into the world