Chapter Two
I have tried, since, to describe the Drowned Court to people who have never seen it, and I always fail in the same place.
It is not that the city is underwater. You expect that; you brace for it; you imagine the weight and the dark.
What undoes you is that the water has manners.
It holds itself back from you in a sphere an arm’s length wide, so that you walk the drowned streets in a pocket of cold air that moves when you move, and the sea stands at the edge of it like a servant who has been told not to touch the guest. You can put your hand past the line if you are stupid or brave.
I did, once, that first day. The water took the warmth out of my fingers and gave it back reluctantly, and I understood that the air around me was not a mercy.
It was a leash. Someone was choosing, breath by breath, not to let me die.
And the city. I will try to set the city down, though I will fail, because the words I have are surface words and the Drowned Court is the thing surface words were invented to forget.
Picture a coastal city the size of a kingdom’s pride, towers, terraces, a harbor, ten thousand windows, and then picture it three hundred years under the cold, every street a canyon of green-black water, every window dark, the great civic stones furred with the slow pale weed that grows where no sun comes.
Picture coral grown up the throats of statues, and the statues still recognizable: a man with his arm raised, a woman with a child, all of them gone soft at the edges the way drowned things go soft.
The light that there was came from nowhere and everywhere, a dim green that did not fall but simply was, and in it the great avenues ran away into dark in every direction, and far down them, here and there, a window burned gold, one, or three, or a whole quiet street of them, and those, I would learn, were the lit quarters, the last of them, the part of the Court that had not yet gone out.
The rest was dark. Mile on mile of dark, and the dark coming up the streets a little further every year, and the cold standing patient at the edge of every gold window like a creditor at a door.
It was beautiful. That is the cruelty of it, the thing I could never make the people on the surface understand.
A dead city should be ugly. This one was beautiful the way a drowned face is beautiful: the features all still there, all still lovely, and nothing behind them but the cold.
I walked through it in my pocket of stolen air with the weed brushing the edge of my pocket like fingers, and I smelled nothing.
That was the first absence, the one that frightened me most; there is no smell underwater, no brine, no rot, no woodsmoke, none of the thousand ordinary stinks that tell a body it is alive.
And I heard nothing but my own feet on wet black stone and my own heart, very loud, the only warm thing for three hundred years in any direction.
I learned that city through my feet before I learned it any other way, because there was nothing else to learn it through.
On the flats I had read the world by its smells: the green stink of soured pans, woodsmoke meaning a hearth and a hearth meaning a roof and a roof meaning safety, the particular rot of the channel at dead low that told you the tide had turned.
Here there was none of it, and so the body, starved, fell back on what it had.
The stone underfoot told me things. Where the streets ran old and untended the black flags had heaved and cracked, and weed had got into the cracks, and I walked careful so as not to turn an ankle in the dark of a kingdom.
Where the streets ran kept (and some did, the avenues toward the lit quarters, swept somehow, tended by hands I did not see) the stone was smooth and cold and almost warm-looking in the green light, the way a thing looks warm when you have been cold long enough to start lying to yourself about it.
I passed a fountain once, in a square, a great basin of carved stone with a figure at its heart, a girl pouring water from a jar, and the joke of it stopped me where I stood: a fountain, under the sea, a thing built to lift water into air, drowned now under all the water in the world, the girl still pouring, the jar still tipped, three hundred years of giving water to a thing that had nothing left to want it.
And the weed. I keep coming back to the weed, because it was the one living thing down there and it was the wrong kind of living.
It grew pale, not the green of the marsh grasses, which at least had the decency to be green, but a colorless grey-white, the color of a thing that has never once met the sun and does not miss it.
It furred the civic stones. It hung in long slow ropes from the lintels of dead doorways and stirred when my pocket of air passed, reaching, the way the long grasses on the flats reached when the tide drew them, except there was no tide here, only me, only my warmth.
And the weed knew it and leaned. I kept to the middle of the streets after that.
I did not want the weed’s fingers at the edge of my air.
I did not want to learn what it felt like to be touched by the only other living thing in a city that had drowned before my grandmother’s grandmother drew breath.
The road of light brought me up a flight of black stairs into a hall with no roof but the ocean, and there the Court was waiting.
They were beautiful the way a riptide is beautiful: from a distance, and briefly.
Tall, most of them, with the wet-gleam skin of people who have never once been warm, a sheen to them like the inside of a shell, and hair that moved in the standing water as though there were a wind only they could feel.
There were perhaps a dozen in the hall and a sense of many more beyond it, a pressure of watchers in the dark past the green light, the way a forest is full of eyes you cannot count.
They did not breathe. I noticed that before I noticed anything else, because I was breathing hard, and the silence where a dozen other breaths should have been was its own cold thing.
A room full of people and only one set of lungs working in it, and those lungs mine.
They wore the drowned. That was the second thing, and the worse one.
Pearls grown over with coral. The brass buttons of sailors a hundred years dead, still bright, polished by some hand that loved to polish them.
A wedding ring on a chain. A christening cup.
A child’s shoe, small, the leather gone soft and dark, worn at the toe the way a shoe wears when a child has only just learned to walk in it.
Trophies. Every grain of warmth the cold sea had ever taken, pinned to a beautiful body and worn like a jewel, and I understood, looking at it, that I was not in a court at all.
I was in a hoard. These were not lords and ladies.
They were the things the sea had kept, dressed in the other things the sea had kept, and the difference between them and the pearls they wore was only that the pearls had stopped pretending.
I made myself read the hoard the way you make yourself read a debt-ledger, line by line, because the thing my mother taught me about the powerful is that they want you to look away, and the small revenge of the powerless is that they refuse.
So I looked. A man with a soldier’s gorget at his throat, the steel of it gone soft and dark, a thing made to stop a blade now worn like a necklace.
A woman with a fisherman’s brass weather-glass hung at her hip on a chain, the kind a captain keeps to read the sky, and what would she do with a weather-glass, three thousand feet under the weather.
A girl, younger-seeming than the rest, who wore a sailor’s whistle on a cord, the bone kind, the kind a man blows to call his crew up from below, and I thought of all the crews that whistle would never call again and had to look at the floor for a moment.
Each piece had been somebody’s. Each piece had been the last warm thing in somebody’s hands, on some grey morning, when the water stood up where they had been.
The Court had collected the warm world’s small griefs the way a child collects shells, for the shine of them, and pinned the shine to itself, and forgotten, or never known, that every shell had been a house, and every house a thing that had once been afraid to lose its life.
That was when I understood how the surface and the deep were the same and not the same.
On the flats we kept the drowned too. We wore their nets, their tools, their boots; nothing was wasted where there was never enough.
But we wept first. We did not pin the dead to our throats and call it ornament.
We mended the net and we used it and we remembered, every haul, whose hands had knotted it, and the remembering was the tax we paid for the using.
The Court had stopped paying the tax. That was the whole difference between a people and a hoard: a people remembers what it wears.
I made myself look at the child’s shoe until I stopped wanting to be sick, and then I made myself look up, because my mother had taught me that you survive the powerful by refusing to perform your fear for them.
They feed on the flinch, she’d said once, of the tithe-priest, of the men who came up the channel to read the ledger.
Not on the salt. The salt’s just the bill.
What they come for is the flinch. I had not understood her then.
I understood her now, standing in a hoard of the drowned with a child’s shoe at eye level, and I lifted my chin, and I gave them nothing.