The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter Read online

  By seven, she was a tall, gangly child. The birthmark across her cheek and nose darkened as she aged and added to her insecurities. She was sullen, and not very popular.

  Her childhood in the hospice was like that of a million others across the League of Nations, all of them born in the wrong place and wrong time, as most children were, it seemed, except that on her eighth birthday, she was selected by the Agency. The inconceivable. She had won the lottery.

  When the news broke, she said nothing. Sat on the edge of her cot, staring into the face of the man who had knocked on the door to her dorm to tell her this information. She listened, wondering what the words meant for her future. Immortality? Death? She had heard these terms many times since coming to this place but she only knew what they implied, not what they meant. The end of existence, certainly, the end of being an unwanted little girl.

  Such a fate could not be bad.

  With two guards at the door, and the other girls cleared out, she hopped off her bunk and began to pack.

  Doctors watched through narrowed eyes.

  At best, dawn managed to tinge the bellies of the clouds amber. Beyond the thick mantle, the sun rose, unseen. Nowy Solum squatted in a fog that would never burn off.

  Hard to imagine that, generations ago, the city—known then merely as Solum—had been nothing but a few huts and servants’ quarters, a hamlet, sprung up around the palatial residence called Jesthe. Semi-cleared footpaths had defined the environs then, a few people within, humble homesteads, thin cows and sheep.

  Remaining in the city’s centrum, the original Jesthe existed still, but lost under additions and slums. Leaning tenements clung to the palace like barnacles, tried to climb her towers. Wings had been built, haphazard shacks raised, hovels and sundry other residences, nailed and wedged and otherwise anchored, both unsolicited and municipally approved—signed for by some castellan or chatelaine, long dead now—others appearing almost overnight, pushed the city and palace ever upward, toward these omnipresent clouds.

  A smattering of lairs were excavated below, where massive cisterns had been discovered.

  The perimeter walls of Nowy Solum struggled to contain almost four hundred thousand denizens. The census takers who arrived at this number included only the more productive and recognizably human residents, omitting those tattooed as melancholics by the chamberlain and his palatinate officers, leaving off the drifters and criminals who came through the gates (hopeful, desperate, and either quickly left the city or more likely perished there, in the streets). Nor were included those living precariously in innumerable crawl spaces, or the beasts, or monsters.

  A few residents of Nowy Solum were well travelled, knowing there is but one continent, extending beyond the walls of the city, encompassing the surrounding desert and outlying forests, reaching out to the ocean. These people had seen windswept vistas and endured horrors and wonders in unmapped hinterlands.

  Most citizens suspected, whether consciously or not, that the advent of Nowy Solum played a formative role in driving the pantheon and their respective congregations to a form of madness; even gods, apparently, cannot compete with the temptations of a city. Now, of course, all manner of immorality and decadence flourished there.

  Days had passed since the commotion in the clouds, when the sky seemed to tear apart, and since the incident had not recurred, more traditional concerns returned to the populace. Officers of the palatinate walked the streets, adhering to their arcane lists of creeds, hoping their actions and faith would bring deities back, once and for all. Watched over by chamberlain Erricus, the officers circulated, collecting taxes. The one clear function left to them. The castellan, who had once given them instruction, was now quite mad, in their eyes, and his daughter, the libidinous and drunken chatelaine, seemed—not just to the palatinate, but to most residents of the city—equally or perhaps even more mad.

  Without their gods, the palatinate were forlorn, clawless.

  As filtered light slowly changed—illuminating the markets and streets and cluttered buildings with a yellowed, hazy quality—much of the populace, yawning, wondered about their next meal, their next coin, or if a knife might part their ribs in a tight alleyway before the concealed sun dropped once more below the equally invisible horizon. The steaming river, known as the Crane, cleaved Nowy Solum into unequal halves, turgid water as brown as the pall that hung overhead. Along the rocky shores, on both sides, ranks and ranks of public outhouses already started to fill. (Recently, clay pipes had been installed in a few of the wealthier dwellings, during a fit of inspiration on the chatelaine’s part, mostly in higher locations—in the North End—and several so-called toilets connected. These mod cons, despite the brief excitement they generated, were basically chutes leading down to clay pipes, which in turn acted as simple conduits to the river, depositing the waste of the rich next to the waste of the poor, where the distinction was lost on the kholics, who attempted, each day, to clean it up.)

  The stench of Nowy Solum grew to a palpable thing, an unavoidable miasma: not just the stench of shit, but of congealed blood from countless animals being slaughtered in the alleys and streets, for sale in the many markets, which were already open and bustling. Meat roasted over a thousand cooking fires.

  Offal of the slaughtered was left, rife with maggots, to rot in the gutters.

  This, too, the kholics cleaned, though some was eaten on the spot. Most they took back to the kitchens of the ostracon.

  This was a time of illness and fevers. People died each day, on dry land, far from the ocean, with water filling their lungs. More would be taken today. There were poxes, skin rots, inexplicable swellings. There were possessions and infestations. Only half of the babies born in the city survived their first week, and a further percentage of these—careful numbers were kept in crabbed handwriting, in the chamberlain’s ledger—got tattooed by the physickers, marked for the black humours that flowed from their spleens.

  Shouts were heard from barkers at New Market, and from those at Horse Fair, joining cries from Soaper’s and Candles.

  At a temple abandoned by its congregation and main sponsor, Tiamat—the goddess who once promised to keep pestilence at bay, and whose body now lay dead in the great desert—bells tolled. A tenant there tended to his flock of poor and displaced.

  Screams pierced Fat Man’s Alley.

  From the barracks at the foot of Jesthe, palatinate officers set out to make rounds. They were to visit the slums near South Gate, and so carried sacks to be filled with a variety of impoverished goods, taken in lieu of coin.

  In the centrum, under the leaning palace, a line-up formed at the main well for bowls of water. There was a fight. The line-up extended all the way down the Street of Horses, lost finally under the houses that pressed up together, as if leaning in for a better look.

  Before too long, most narrow streets and alleys—relatively still overnight—were busy. Prostitutes, bleary eyed and strung out, dreamed of sleeping for a fortnight, alone. Noblemen and labourers alike arose to knuckle their eyes. Underfed children kneeled, begging on corners.

  Women shopped and gossiped.

  A squalling child was born; an old lady clutched her robes and died, on her feet.

  Kholics cleaned.

  From everywhere, people emerged: from inside the structures, from underneath, climbing about on top.

  The heat of another stagnant day grew and grew, trapped under thick, eternal cover.

  And, in her bedchambers, buried within the rundown palace known as Jesthe, the chatelaine of Nowy Solum came awake, very hung over, to a pounding at her door.

  Where the sun had not yet risen, icy mountains cragged. The River Crane was born in these remote glaciers. Past the mountains, the ocean extended outward, to plunge over the edge of the world and roil there, in the great abyss.

  And, above the clouds, a man known as padre hornblower lifted his wooden horn to live up to his name. Hornblower also abided in a city of sorts—settlement, perhaps, would be a bet
ter term—but where he lived was not massive, nor congested, nor even built upon solid land: hornblower and his people had constructed their handful of huts high in the branches of a massive tree, a tree so tall it pierced the mantle of the world to brush against open skies.

  The blast of hornblower’s horn had been clear and loud and continued to reverberate his finely tuned tympanums. He felt a swelling of pride. Sniffing at the breezes, hornblower understood that his body was filled with potency and the strengths of his position. All was as it should be. He felt good. Cradling the horn, hornblower hardened his face and scanned the small crowd gathered on the branch before him, his gaze lingering on two girls standing near the front. Just this season the pair had reached the age of red sap. Needless to say, the girls stuck close to their mother’s side.

  Hornblower smiled. Moonlight was strong, the assembly silvered. All eyes were upon him.

  Not one of these people—neither hornblower, nor the menstruating girls, nor anyone in the small settlement who had gathered here—suspected that they lived at the pinnacle of an oversized plant. Nor did they imagine that a place such as Nowy Solum could exist, far below, several hundred kilometres away. The citizens of this settlement, in fact, believed that the only thing under the clouds—which yawned, forever, and always, all around them—were piles of bones and ash, all stirred by poisonous winds. Great Anu, blind power of the sky, had told them this. Only the dead, he said (to their ancestors, anyhow), emptied of their souls, can pass through the eternal mantle. Should any man with his soul intact penetrate the clouds, they would face torment for all eternity.

  Anu liked to talk in these terms.

  A few fools still tried to climb down the trunk, never to be seen again.

  If padre hornblower were to look up, he would see the firmament, which he tells his people should be both worshipped and feared, for in heaven Anu still lived. Hornblower had actually seen the power once, as a child: in his memory, Anu looked like a small, bright sun, but elongated, eyes dim as he moved slowly across the dusk. On all sides, the great power had been ringed by dozens of tiny ambassadors.

  Back in the days of hornblower’s grandpadre, Anu and his ever-present minions used to descend regularly, to assign quests and to kill heretics by making red sap burst from their ears and their noses. No one had seen the sky power in years. Nonetheless, hornblower often warned the population at his sermons about the very real possibility of angry visits. Frightened citizens maintained hornblower’s own best interests, and were easiest to control.

  Again, he looked at the girls.

  Of course, many times the little ambassadors came down, to this day, relaying information, or merely hovering, watching the settlement. These visits hornblower had experienced on countless occasions. No ambassadors, unfortunately, had arrived on this night, the night of the funeral, but hornblower had not given up hope that a few might show toward the end, to add to the dramatic effect.

  Never mind, he thought. The horn blast had been a good one.

  And, when the service was over, visiting the girls would be a solemn pleasure.

  Had everybody arrived? These dullards were so slow. Punishments would be meted for tardiness.

  The growing wind caused branches of the world to whip the sky. When hornblower finally did cast his eyes up to view the vista that occupied his thoughts, and to add another accent to the faded echoes of his horn’s blast, he saw—instead of the endless firmament, or mighty Anu descending, or even a cloud of his loyal ambassadors—the scruffy bower of the exile, Pan Renik. A small black void floated in the upper branches. Hornblower’s eyes were drawn to the nest, this transgression, this gall among his people. Though the construction of the bower appeared tiny against the backdrop of heaven, hornblower scowled, and his momentum, for a moment, was thrown.

  He cleared his throat and shifted his feet. He wanted to shout at all the people now, tell them to move forward, to hurry up, but padres should remain silent at such formal occasions—

  Damn the exile!

  He glanced up again.

  Beyond the assembled populace were clouds, naturally, a thousand formations of clouds, sunlit by day, illuminated by the moon, or by a smattering of stars, like now, by night.

  He stared at the girls a third time, but with anger. They cowered closer to their mother.

  The last of the residents finally arrived, responding belatedly to hornblower’s perfect call, wiping sleep from their lazy faces.

  Another padre, bellringer, gave his signal, rung on high, and the funeral began.

  Chosen exemplar of the most benevolent sisters Kingu and Aspu, who were in repose and had been for as long as time immemorial, bless them, was also resting, stretched in a hammock with his youngest wife, when he felt an acidic tinge abruptly mingle in his saliva. Surprised, he sat up, choking. The burning in his throat worsened and he began to cough. His eyes watered.

  A summons.

  The hammock had been set up in the shade, near the pepper fields. He looked out over the gardens, toward the ridge of hills. The day was mostly warm and breezy. Pressed against him, his youngest wife remained fast asleep. The exemplar tried to suppress his coughing, so as to not wake her.

  Both he and this wife had spent a great deal of the previous night awake with their infant son, who was not a good sleeper, and who cried every time he was left alone. Maybe the boy was cutting teeth?

  Seven years since the exemplar had accepted the host of the benevolent sisters, bless them, into his mouth. There had only been perhaps twelve previous summonses. Most of the time, the sisters communicated by the voice of the seed he had swallowed, talking softly in his head, but on occasion they wanted him physically at their side, as a witness, when they announced to him certain plans for the village, such as how to best cull ducks, or how to forge the sharpest of knifes. Once, the exemplar had to reconnect a damaged cable that had come loose from one of the goddesses’ great flanks during a storm. (The exemplar had a hard time distinguishing Kingu from Aspu: the sisters, bless them, were identical.)

  He hoped this summons would be for as simple a request.

  Disentangling from his wife—who grumbled a complaint and moaned but did not wake—the exemplar managed to clumsily stand. He had never quite mastered getting in or out of hammocks and was satisfied with himself that he had not fallen or dumped his wife out on her ample ass. The burning in his throat had lessened but he knew this was because he had moved; if he were to lie back down again, try close his eyes, the discomfort would resume, twofold.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I thought you were asleep,” he said. “I’ll be back soon. The sisters are calling me. Bless them. Go back to sleep.”

  “The sisters?” She rolled in the hammock, face averted, hips rising. “Mmmmm . . .”

  The exemplar blinked and, watching his youngest wife, adjusted his genitals beneath his robe. He had woken with a hard-on. When he returned, maybe they could make love? Being tired made him horny. So did warm days. And breezes. And hammocks. He smiled slightly, rubbing at his face, considering, just for a second, postponing his response to the summons. But that would be foolish: who in the world would ignore the call of their goddess?

  “I won’t be long,” he said. “Hold that pose.”

  “Don’t even think about waking me.”

  He could tell she too was smiling.

  The exemplar had left his sandals at home, so he had to pick his way carefully, barefoot around the garden, heading toward the pad where the benevolent sisters lay dreaming. Keeping an eye out for snakes or thistles or anything else that could hurt his feet, he heard from beyond the trees the laughter of children, playing nearby, drifting though the walls of foliage. He was unsure if any of this laughter was from his own children, but the sounds helped relax the exemplar nonetheless.

  Just for a moment’s isolation he and his wives went to the hammock. For naps, and to maybe fool around. He touched his cock again through his robe, almost entertaining the thought that
being an exemplar for his community was an imposition at times like this, but the sisters could read such thoughts, bless them, so he suppressed the idea as best he could, trying to hurry, and be devout.

  Beyond the row of trees, he descended a path of black lava stones, which were sharp and further slowed his progress. At the crest of a second stony slope he cursed himself for not going back to his home to retrieve his sandals; he knew he must have looked ridiculous mincing his way down to where the goddesses slept.

  If they wanted to, they could have seen him through his own eyes. They could watch this embarrassing display, if they chose.

  Ahead, to the left of the great mountain, the dull ocean glimmered under cover of the clouds. A storm was picking up, far out over the water, angry and black. Even here, winds grew stronger. He sniffed the air. He would need to keep an eye on this weather, though the rocks that ringed the shallow crater where the sisters had instructed his ancestors to build sheltered the small community—

  Like a stab in his throat, another bitter call came, a taste so sharp and painful that the exemplar groaned aloud and put his hands up to his neck.

  Hurry. You need to watch us leave. What’s taking you?

  He was frozen with shock. Had the sisters said what he thought they had? Leave? Was leaving possible? The benevolent sisters, bless them, had always been sitting side by side, inert, on their pad. How could they leave?

  Filling with foreboding now, regardless of the pain in his feet, the exemplar began to run.

  At the northern extremity of the community, ringed by boysen-berry bushes and clusters of red flowers, the sisters rested on their massive shale slab. Looking overhead, the mountain was craggy and dark green. When the exemplar got very close to where the sisters rested, he felt movement in the ground under his bare feet, and movement—not a wind, but a tremor, a quaver—in the air itself.