Chapter 3
“Where the hell did you get to?” she said. “And did you find us a boat?”
“The Squirrel,” I told her: “ketch, a hundred and seventy-five tons, leaving here for Choris on the dawn tide, arriving Choris in three days. Two deniers each and we bring our own food. All right?”
“Three days on a poxy little ketch. Swell.”
If I’d got us on a bigger, slower ship, she’d have moaned about the extra day. “Cheer up,” I said. “It’ll be fine. The only really tricky bit will be getting round Dagger Point, and after that it’ll be plain sailing all the way. Trust me.”
I’d already been round Dagger Point twice, though on both occasions it had been summer, and I suffered no more than a thorough drenching and a very mild concussion.
It’s not quite as easy in the spring. I don’t know anything about sailing and navigation, but apparently there’s a different sort of tide and a change in the direction of the wind, and you’re liable to get caught between the pestle and the mortar, which we were.
The crew of the Squirrel were used to making the run at that time of year and I don’t suppose we were really in any significant danger, except maybe once or twice, when the foremast snapped and when a stupidly big wave nearly flipped us over like a pancake.
And, just as I’d promised her, after Dagger Point it was all calm and nice, comparatively speaking.
Anyway, she was too busy dying to bother going through my luggage (a habit of hers when she’s bored), and so I didn’t have to worry about her finding the box.
“I’ve made up my mind,” she said, as the white towers of Choris Anthropou appeared on the skyline. “We’re walking back.”
“No we—”
“Yes, we are,” she said firmly. “I’m perfectly serious. If we go north up to Olbia, then follow the coast round and then head north-east up through Permia, it shouldn’t take more than eight months, and we’ll stand a much better chance of getting home alive. I mean it.”
“All that fuss and nonsense over a bit of weather,” I said. “You need to get a grip if you want to stay in this line of work.”
Everyone goes on about the beauty and grandeur of Choris Anthropou, but I have to admit, I can take it or leave it alone.
You’ve got the core of the old imperial city, which is really rather fine but not a patch on Mavais or Iden, if you ask me; the rest of it is just narrow, cluttered streets of thatched wooden houses, the only difference being that there’s an awful lot more of them than you’ll find anywhere else.
The Auzida smashed up the old imperial aqueduct, so water is always a problem in Choris.
They’ve got more than a hundred wells, but over half of them run dry in the summer, and nobody’s ever figured out a way of patching up the old imperial cisterns so they’ll hold water worth a damn.
Consequently they fill up in the spring rains, then leak for a month or so, turning the streets under West Hill into a muddy nightmare, and by the time water’s most needed, in the summer heat, they’re bone dry.
This means there’s never any water available to put out fires, so if you’ve been away from Choris for more than a year or so, don’t expect to be able to find your way round the maze of streets in Lower Town from memory, because large parts of it will have burned down and been rebuilt since you were last there.
Stay away from Riverside unless you enjoy cholera, and don’t go east of the Foundry under any circumstances.
North Hill is where all the rich people live, merchants and goldsmiths and the men who own the factories and tanneries in South Port.
They’ve colonised the ruins of the imperial suburb and done their best to rebuild them, which accounts for the rather weird blend of architectural styles – marble, granite and adobe in the same frontage, and late Principate town houses roofed with reed thatch – but the result is rather sad, if you ask me.
Probably the most depressing sight in Choris is what used to be the Gardens of Florian, which is now the pen where the bear-baiters keep their stock in trade.
They’ve built a massive wooden stockade, rather more defensible and much better maintained than the city wall, with fortified gatehouses every hundred yards and a regular patrol along the perimeter, to stop people breaking in and stealing the bears.
The Hippodrome, where the emperors used to watch the chariot races, is now a sort of communal market garden, with the south end mostly used for rearing and training fighting cocks.
Nobody’s ever tried to rebuild the Golden Star or the Hope, so the only big temple still in regular use is the Pearl, which sprawls like a beached whale among the watercress sellers in Towngate.
The dome is still intact, but at some point someone stripped all the gilded copper off the roof of the nave and replaced it with salvaged slates, which blew off because nobody understands slate roofing any more.
These days it’s reed thatch, with storks nesting in it and making a hell of a racket during the Eucharist.
Choris people don’t mind any of that, of course, because it’s what they’ve always known and they can’t imagine anything different.
For someone like me, though, who knows Choris from the descriptions in thousand-year-old books, it’s all a bit depressing.
You feel like you’ve come home, but home is a desolate ruin; the trees have been cut down, the damp’s got in behind the plaster, and nobody could be bothered to do anything about it.
But Choris natives think it’s the most glorious place in the world, and the giants who built it roofed the Pearl with thatch because that’s what you make roofs out of; and besides, Choris thatch is by definition better than any thatch anywhere else in the world, and if you don’t agree you know what you can do.
The other thing about Choris is the smell. It takes eighteen months to get used to it, apparently, and then you don’t notice it at all.
“This place stinks,” she said. “It’s like one big shitheap.”
“Yes,” I said, “but maybe you shouldn’t say so quite so loud, or people might think you’re being unkind about their city. That over there,” I said, pointing, “is the Theatre of Athanaric. Or at least, that’s where it used to be.”
“I don’t like this town,” she said. “I came here when I was nineteen. I didn’t like it much then.”
She never talks about her life before she joined the order – understandably, I guess.
That, therefore, constituted an almost unprecedented confidence and outpouring of her inner soul, suggesting she was in a good mood, in spite of the smell.
“I’m not crazy about it myself,” I said.
“Right, if that’s the theatre, we need to head up the hill as far as Coppermarket, at which point we should be able to see Old Town above us on our left. ”
“If you say so,” she said. “What’ve you got in that sack?”
“Nothing. Just a few old books I bought in Mavais.”
Which was, of course, strictly speaking true.
After a couple of false starts, we emerged from the thatch-and-timber thickets into the broad, paved streets of the old city.
North of Horsefair and inside the old inner wall you’re quite high up and the smell isn’t nearly so bad.
There are fewer people in the streets, and they tend to be better dressed and not quite so liable to murder you for the nails in your boots.
Also, you can see where you’re going. “That big white thing over there,” I said, pointing.
“That’s the watchtower of the citadel, which backs onto the university, which is where we’re going. ”
The university was founded fifteen hundred years ago by Basiliscus II, to be a meeting place and centre of excellence for scholars from all across the empire.
A century before the Fall, Bauderic gave it to Holy Mother Church, and these days it’s a beehive of busy clerics, mostly accountants and their clerks, recording the receipts from the outer dioceses and paying it over to the various stipendiary prelates who live in Choris full time and do whatever it is they do, to the greater glory of the Invincible Sun.
The university houses the biggest and most comprehensive collection of nephews, brothers-in-law and off-relations of noble houses to be found anywhere on earth, and accounts for two-thirds of the revenues of our Holy Mother.
There’s also a library, which you can’t get into without a special pass signed by a bishop, a hall of records and the Chapter House, formerly the summer palace of Genseric the Wise.
That’s where all the ecumenical councils have been held.
It’s the only building still standing this side of Echmen big enough to hold that many delegates, and it’s always been my life’s ambition to get inside it.
“This isn’t what I was expecting,” she said, as we took our place in a line outside the Chapter House gate. “We may need to think of another plan.”
The same thought had occurred to me. My plan was founded on the descriptions in old books which I told you about earlier, but I could see at a glance that it wasn’t going to work.
The Chapter House, according to the books, boasts a dome, built by the legendary Pauscinna, sheathed in gold and visible for miles around because of its unique height.
I looked at the Chapter House. There was no dome.
“Oh, that,” said the man next to us in the queue, when I asked him if he knew what had become of it.
“It collapsed about forty years ago. They’ve got what’s left of the roof shored up with timbers and covered over with oilskins, and I think there’s a committee working on how to fix it permanently.
I gather that when it fell in, it took out the whole of the upper storeys. A great pity, but what can you do?”
“A nuisance,” I agreed. “So what are they doing about accommodation for the delegates?”