Chapter 28 #2
‘This is nothing,’ Fola said, gesturing to the bathwater with the bar of soap.
‘In the City, there are pools of all kinds, cold and hot, available to all at any time of day. Waters that seep into your body and leave you energised. Others that lull you to the edge of a pleasant sleep while holding you aloft. Even one that simulates the waves of the sea.’ She laughed.
‘People don’t only bathe in that one. I don’t know how it started, but there’s a whole cadre of folk who’ve taken to standing atop wooden planks and riding the wave while it curls and breaks. ’
Siwan cocked her head. ‘Why?’
‘For fun,’ Fola said. ‘That’s the main reason people do things, where I come from.
Fun, or fulfilment. Some folks work, but mostly because they find meaning in it.
We have everything we need.’ She gestured to Frog, and to her full purse on the bedside table.
‘The City provides, freeing us up to explore and experiment and find all kinds of new ways to spend our time. Like making music, only without the threat of starvation if we fail to find a new crowd every night.’
‘There are musicians here who do not starve,’ Siwan said defensively. ‘Performers on The Rose stage of Afondir live like princes, it’s said.’
Memories of Jareth’s ghost bubbled up: of his glimpse of his mother on that stage, and his burning desire to join her.
Fola lowered herself deeper into the tub.
That was what the folk here considered ‘a great stage’.
Well made, she supposed, with a sweeping roof to carry voices and music to the balconies and back seats.
Nothing compared to any of the amphitheatres or pavilions scattered throughout the City.
‘How many get the chance to perform there?’
Siwan glared at her.
‘Not many, I wager,’ Fola went on. ‘Less than a hundred in a generation. Probably less than a thousand people in your trade live comfortably in this kingdom. In the City, no artist starves, nor has to divert time or attention away from her art and towards survival.’
‘There can’t be audience enough for all of them,’ Siwan argued.
Frog cocked his head at her as she stopped scratching him and held her hands stiffly in her lap.
People did not like to hear these things, Fola had learned.
Whether from envy, or frustration with their own lot in life, or simple disbelief that the world could be any way other than what they had known, most folk reacted with hostility to tales of the City’s bounty.
If every rumour of the City were believed, rather than discounted as an impossible dream, there would be an endless stream of pilgrims to those ever-open gates until every land stood empty and every king was left without a kingdom.
And then, perhaps, the City would begin to spread.
With that many people, the bare fraction who joined the Library would transform from a scant, eccentric club to an army numbering tens of thousands.
Progress in thaumaturgic research would accelerate by leaps and bounds.
Mastery to rival the First Folk would be in reach.
Eventually all the world might be transformed into a reflection of the City, with enough for all, and justice maintained less by the sword than by the excision of those threats, fears, pressures and hatreds that bred cruelty and violence.
A world worth suffering through a few years of deprivation, danger and sub-par baths to build.
And with Siwan’s help, on returning to the City, Fola’s project might progress.
The First Folk’s souls might be reached, their knowledge gleaned.
The wonders they had left to the City might be better understood, and reconstructed, and brought to places like Parwys, that could sorely benefit from them.
‘You are right,’ Fola said. ‘There are only so many people in the City, and not every artist will find popularity. There are those with audiences of thousands, and those who play only in the street for the occasional passer-by. I’ll not claim there are no resentments.
No dreams unfulfilled. No musician who does not wish to walk a stage she does not yet have enough support to access, nor artist who does not wish more eyes found delight in his paintings, nor writer who hopes his words will find more ready minds. ’
She felt that little needle of pain in her own heart.
Substitute ‘artist’ with ‘researcher’ and ‘audience’ with ‘approval by the research board to utilise vast quantities of thaumacite’, and she could be describing herself.
‘Not every person can be held in equal esteem, after all,’ she went on.
‘People only like to look at diamonds because not every stone in the world is a diamond. Popularity will always be a rarefied thing. The difference is that, in the City, none of these folk need do anything but pursue that dream, nor worry about anything but making their work the best it can be. There is no scarcity of food, or shelter, or good clothes and small luxuries to distract and complicate that pursuit.’
‘It sounds wonderful,’ Siwan said, but by the girl’s posture and expression Fola could see that she did not really believe.
It was so difficult to explain these things to those who had never seen them.
When you have only ever known a world of constant struggle and competition, not for regard and achievement but for base survival, it was difficult to envision anything else.
And there was always that implicit question: ‘If the City is so great as all that, why did you leave?’
Fola sighed again and held out the bar of soap. ‘Scrub my back, would you, and then take your turn before the water gets too cold.’
Siwan hopped down from the bed—eliciting a startled squawk from Frog. For a few moments she silently worked the soap into a lather, which she rubbed into Fola’s back. Tension unwound between Fola’s shoulder blades. Even after four years wandering the world, she still got saddle-sore.
‘What’s your interest in me, then?’ Siwan asked. ‘I mean … you’ve gone well out of your way to help me. What do you stand to gain?’
Reflexively, Fola wanted to challenge the idea that people only did things because they stood to gain something—but that would be disingenuous, in this case. Then again, people tended to react badly when directly told, ‘I would like to study you, academically.’
‘What do you know of the First Folk?’ she answered with a question of her own.
Siwan dipped the soap in the water. ‘Not much. Mostly myths and rumours.’
‘Us, too,’ Fola said. ‘We have some fragments of writing. Some ability to translate from their language. Not enough, even with magical enchantments that usually make it easy to parse and learn a new tongue. Volumes and volumes of books, though, all written in a language we can’t understand.
’ She remembered her first tour through those labyrinthine halls beneath the Library Tower.
Pick a book at random and you were likely to find an inscrutable mess of squiggly symbols and bizarre illustrations.
One in a thousand was written in a script anyone left alive could read with anything approaching fluency.
A treasure trove of information, locked behind languages lost with the vanishing of those who used them.
‘Sorry to say I don’t read First Folk,’ Siwan said. ‘And if you suspect the raven bastard does, I’m equally sorry to say languages aren’t its foremost skill.’
‘No.’ Fola chuckled. ‘That would be raising the dead, it seems.’
Siwan paused, the bar of soap pressed firmly against the back of Fola’s neck. Not quite in a headspace fit for bleak humour, yet. Possibly never would be.
‘For the last twenty years I have been working on a project,’ Fola went on. ‘An idea for how we might unlock all that knowledge in all those books. After all, who better to teach us their language than the First Folk themselves?’
‘You’re looking for First Folk?’ Siwan said. ‘Aren’t they all gone?’
‘Yes, as far as anyone can be certain of anything. But “gone” doesn’t mean inaccessible, exactly.
The dead are gone, too, but they leave traces.
Strong memories with a life of their own—ghosts and wraiths.
With the right knowledge and the right artifact we can call those memories up, speak with them, learn from them.
’ And, she did not say, though she remembered the bone pits and flesh machines of Ulun, borrow their power for our own dark purposes.
‘My notion is to conjure up the ghosts of the First Folk. The City is full of things they left behind with apparent purpose and intent. Things that mattered to them. It should be possible, then, to use the City as a catalyst, connect to a strong memory, and make contact with one of its builders, if only long enough for a few lessons in First Folk language.’
‘You mean to speak with them the way you spoke with Jareth,’ Siwan said. ‘But he was dead. The First Folk didn’t die, did they? Weren’t they immortal, like the fae?’
‘Frankly, we don’t know,’ Fola answered.
‘So the myths and legends say. What we do know is that the ordinary means of conjuring a ghost don’t seem to work on them.
I have theories as to why, and a plan to test them, but …
Well, suffice to say not everything in the City is limitlessly available, and my experiments would be costly.
The people who decide how to deploy certain resources don’t quite share my enthusiasm for my theories. ’
‘I don’t see how any of this relates to me.’ Siwan swallowed and shook her head. A tear choked her voice. ‘I wish it did. Stones, I wish I knew why any of this was happening. Losing control to the raven fiend is bad enough.’