CHAPTER THREE
The city tram sailed through the hilly metropolis, up and down the cobbles like a ship coursing over great tidal waves.
It was a mechanical beast of pumping gears and whirring pistons, creaking and wheezing, and when it docked at Ravensport, at Blackford, at Pultney Park and beyond, it spewed forth its passengers, swallowed up more, and shot off again without even checking if the doors had shut.
It was late spring in the city of Alliaster, and the jacarandas were in bloom.
The colossal trees, planted in the previous century, lined the boulevard.
This vista – of lavender petals sprinkling over motor cars, trams, hawkers and street performers – was so favoured by the country’s outdoor oil colourists that one could find postcards of the famous scene even in the smallest grocers in the furthest corners of Calléum.
The sky, visible in snatches through the purple petals and streetlamps, darkened like wet paper soaking in ink.
Viewing this from behind the tram’s grime-coated windows was an old woman smoking a pipe, a girl in a camel-coloured beret, a mountain spirit whose wide, grey body took up two seats and glittered like stone under morning sun, and Dot.
She sat at the back, clasping the handles of her carpet bag with nail-bitten fingers.
The walk from the cottage to the station had been long, the train boarded before dawn.
She had travelled fourteen or so hours thus far, watching the sun rise over the wide expanse of the sea, the mountains and farmland and sparse villages and quaint towns.
At last, as the daylight had begun to fade, she saw the capital city, Alliaster.
Dot had promptly transferred from the train at Grand Central Station to the city tram, which was where she now sweated under the weight of her wool coat.
She had needed the garment to fend off Seafarthing’s south polar winds but now, a whole day north, she felt quite stupid beneath the oppressive, itchy fabric.
If she removed it, the other passengers would surely see the pools of perspiration across her back.
Dot readjusted her hat. Her hair stuck in strands to her neck.
The women of the city, she had quickly noticed, wore their hair bobbed.
Dot watched them from the window, walking along the pavement in suede heels, clasping cigarette holders and leashed terriers, their lips reddened and oiled.
How darling they looked. How glamorous and bright.
The tram halted, then lurched and set off again up another cobbled hill.
The passengers, reading their novels and drumming their fingers, glanced now and then, glumly, toward the deepening night-time.
Now, with its interior lamps on, the tram contained its passengers like an aquarium contains its fish: illuminated from within, each forlorn creature peering out at the dark and intangible world beyond the glass.
Dot checked her watch. It was half past seven.
She opened her carpet bag just a fraction, pulled out a little phial of her tonic and took a sip.
Prickly warmth gushed through her. She placed the phial back and closed her bag, reopened it again to double check she had stoppered the lid properly, closed the bag, and opened it one last time just to triple check, lest the sea-green medicine leak out and stain her blouses forever.
She inspected the contents of her coin purse and took out the little notebook where she tracked her expenses.
Total train fare – 26 silvers, 45 coppers
Egg sandwich at Kolp Station – 95 coppers
Black tea on the special express to Alliaster – 52 coppers
Tram ticket from Grand Central Station to Lecustre Square – 1 silver, 50 coppers
Almost a whole week’s wages spent in a single day.
Dot leaned her head against the thrumming glass and was transfixed as she watched the thickets of spirits weaving along the footpaths.
Never before had Dot seen so many; they burst from every crevice of the city, large and small, opaque and translucent, animal-like, or monstrous, or tiny, each darting hither and thither like a great reef of colourful fish.
The tram passed the National Theatre. The Calléan Opera House.
Hemmington’s white marble department store.
A gaggle of pretty women exited the cinema, arm-in-arm and cackling.
One glanced upward at the tram and caught Dot’s eye.
Dot scuttled her scuffed lace-ups underneath her seat and out of view, even if only to herself.
‘Lecustre Square,’ called the driver, and Dot scrambled from her seat. She thanked him and climbed down onto the pavement, stilling as she saw Saint Penelope’s Cathedral.
It loomed over the square like a giant sat cross-legged, a holy structure built thirteen centuries ago out of stone and green marble, of jade and tesserae. Its spires reached up into the darkness and poked the holes into the blanket of night that now revealed the stars.
Four religions had been practised under the cathedral’s great dome.
Incense had changed to idols and then to beads and then to silver.
Four times, conquered. With each tumble of the crown, the great cathedral had absorbed the influence of its new inhabitants, along with the rest of the melting pot city.
Jade had been added to the dome five hundred years earlier by the Leithians.
The grand mosaics were the addition of the Ghists.
And the stained-glass mural of the Saint, Herself?
Why, that had been there since the beginning, added by the queen, Calléa. Saint Penelope’s wife.
Dot could do little more than stare.
She had no religion of her own. Yet, with an almost divine rapture, she gawked at the far cathedral.
Here it was – finally – in waking reality, so much larger than the illustration on her bedroom wall had made it seem.
Her eyes darted, trying to catch every detail: the belfry, the carved arches, the purple carpets at the floor of the entrance so obscured by the silhouettes of thousands of tourists and spirits that she had to squint to see them.
So bewitched by the cathedral was she that Dot did not hear the babble of the crowd, nor the cries of the street performers, nor the, at first, polite voice of the mountain spirit asking her to step out of the way of the tram door.
She did not hear him when he repeated himself, nor when he cleared his throat – not until he bellowed, ‘For heaven’s sake, girl.
Move!’ and shoved her so forcefully that she was thrown onto the concrete.
She landed on her bag, glass crunching beneath her. Her wrist skinned the pavement. Dot lay on the ground for a moment, stunned, her heart thrumming in her throat.
She glanced up to see the mountain spirit disappear into the throng, shaking his head. Eyes were on her. Too many pairs. Dot scooped up her bag, now dripping with sea-green tonic, and hid her face as she darted away, catching only the clipped sound of laughter from the crowd.
Dot pushed through the throng of people, her vision smeared by a flurry of tears, until she found a concrete step at the edge of the square and sat down.
She opened up her bag and, fingers tremoring, tried to pick out the shattered glass.
Two of her blouses were ripped. She mopped up the tonic as best she could with her bath towel.
Tiny insects swarmed the lampposts. The smell of pastry, pistachios and clotted cream wafted from a nearby street vendor.
But Dot’s groaning stomach was tempered by humiliation.
She refused to look down at her grazed wrist so it was quite by accident that she caught the eye of a pale man, half a century old, wearing a jade-coloured smock.
‘Fortunate,’ said the monk, coming to her, ‘aren’t we?’
He had an accent from one of the northern countries, and his yellow hair was braided down his back. Dot tried to smile.
He seemed to take this as an invitation. ‘How much will you give?’
‘Give?’ asked Dot.
‘To the relief fund,’ said the monk, sitting too close.
His breath was sour. She leaned away. He slipped a beaded bracelet over her wrist and handed her a sheet of prayers stamped in a script she could not read.
‘You are a compassionate creature, I am certain. The famine will be glad for your donation.’
‘Famine?’
The monk’s eyes widened.
‘In Beleust, of course. The floods. Did you not see the news of them?’
‘Oh?’ said Dot, clutching her bag a little tighter. ‘No, I suppose I didn’t.’
‘Ah,’ said the monk. ‘The floods were terrible. Last summer, they destroyed so much of the country. Now the spring is here, they have run out of food. Many, many dead. You see this little girl?’ He pulled a daguerreotype from inside his robe, and showed Dot a starved child.
‘My colleague tells me that she will be sold. Salamander, you know him?’
‘Who?’
‘The daemon. He collects servants. Spirits. Children, sometimes. They work in his factories.’
Dot stared at him a moment, and then back at the girl.
‘Bless you,’ said the monk, taking out a ledger. ‘Fifteen silvers will feed twenty families, you know.’
‘What?’ asked Dot.
‘Your donation,’ said the monk.
‘But,’ said Dot, ‘I can’t—’
‘Twelve silvers will do fine,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Dot.
‘Six then.’ The monk’s smile was tight. ‘Even a small amount will help many. You have had the fortune of a full breakfast every day since you were small, yes?’
‘Well,’ said Dot, ‘I suppose . . . I mean, of course. Yes. I’m sorry. Maybe I can donate.’
Dot reached for her purse.
‘He’s told you lies, you know.’
A gaunt young woman had interrupted. Her hands were in her pockets, the harsh lamplight illuminating the hollows of her eyes and cheeks as if she were a corpse, animated. Her mouth quirked at Dot as she walked past.
‘Salamander does not steal children,’ said the stranger, ‘and that man is not a monk.’
A moment of absolute stillness transpired.
Then, the false monk ripped the bracelet from Dot’s wrist. It broke, scattering beads all over the step.
He fled, his yellow braid writhing as he disappeared into the crowd.
Dot stared after him for a long moment, one wrist stinging from his touch, the other from the graze upon the concrete not five minutes earlier.
Her eyes prickled again, and Dot turned her face away from the cathedral.
She couldn’t bear for that stone giant to see her, pathetic, surrounded by the debris of her naivety.
Clearly, she was not one of these bright and shiny young women of the city.
Instead, she was a tawdry thing of dull grey wool and stockings bought on sale and haircuts in the kitchen. Simply, a tatty girl from the seaside.
Dot made up her mind to leave the square and walk to the cheap hostel she had found in the newspaper. She glanced back to thank the gaunt young woman, but found no one.