CHAPTER SIX The Court of Tides
CHAPTER SIX
The Court of Tides
Nobody built it. That was the first thing I got wrong, and the first thing I had to unlearn, and the unlearning took me three days.
From a distance it reads as architecture: towers and terraces, the long level lines of something laid out by people who knew what they meant it for.
Close to, nothing is joined. No blocks, no courses, no mortar, no seams. The great pale masses run on unbroken the way a shell does, and where a tower meets the ground it doesn’t sit on it.
It comes up out of it, thickening at the foot like a tree.
In my first hour I put my hand on a wall. It was warm, and faintly ridged, and it gave a little under my palm, and I snatched my hand back and had to be talked down for a while.
“It grew,” Threnn said. “Slowly, and with a great deal of encouragement. There are four families who do nothing else and have done nothing else for nine hundred years.”
“It’s alive.”
“Not in any way that would interest a physician.” She was already walking on. “It’s alive the way coral is alive. Don’t ask it questions. It won’t have any.”
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If I could get only one thing down, it would be the light.
It comes from below, and from inside things.
Every surface in that city has some part of it that glows, and no two glow the same.
The great avenues run blue-white and steady.
The terraces where people live are a lower gold.
Along the lower quarters, where the vents come up, there are long streaks of that rose colour, always shifting, so that the whole district seems to be breathing in slow pink.
And because the light comes up from underneath, every face is wrong. The shadows sit above the brow and under the lip, and everybody you meet looks a bit like the effigy on their own tomb.
I’d had no idea, until then, that I’d spent my whole life reading people by the light coming at them from a window.
There’s no sky, either. You look up into a deep vaulted dark with shapes moving in it: the undersides of shoals, drifting over like weather, and once the long slow shadow of something very large going by three hundred feet above the towers while nobody bothered to look up.
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The sound I noticed late, the way you notice you’ve been hearing a mill wheel all afternoon.
There’s a constant low note. It’s the water moving through the city, as wind moves through a wood, and every structure gives it a different pitch, so that the whole place hums in a chord that changes as you walk.
The great avenue near the Court is a low drone you feel in your breastbone.
The stepped terraces on the eastern shoulder sit higher and waver, and I couldn’t bear them, and was told, kindly, that nobody can at first.
Under all of it, so deep it stops being sound, there’s a pulse. Six or seven seconds apart, and vast. The whole city shifts on it very slightly, and the whole water, and my own ribs with them.
“What is that.”
“The Deep,” said Kael, in the voice of a man who’s been asked to identify a ceiling.
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I’ll put down what I ate, because nobody ever asks, and I’ve found it’s the detail that makes people believe the rest.
A pale thing like a sea-fig, with black seeds, sweeter than anything that grows on land.
Something that was without question a fish, and without question raw, and for no reason I could make out, warm, which I liked a great deal more than I’ve ever said aloud.
A broth, salt and bitter, that did something odd to the back of my throat, and which Threnn described, without smiling, as mostly medicine.
You don’t chew underwater so much as take. The water comes in too. The whole business is nearer drinking than eating.
They gave me a room that first night, on a terrace on the western side, and it had a window, which is an absurd thing to own where there’s no weather.
Every night I was there I sat in it for an hour looking down the long gold avenue with the great shapes going over, and thought about my kitchen, and the fourth stair, and a man on a beach with the print of my palm under his thumb.
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By the fourth day I’d stopped being looked at. Or I’d stopped expecting to be.
It started in the first hour, and I put it down to manners. We came up the great avenue from the landing among two hundred people or so going about the ordinary business of a Tuesday, and heads turned and turned back, the usual ration any stranger gets anywhere.
Not one of them caught.
No snag. No man’s stride shortening. Nobody further up the avenue looking twice, no face going slack and lit, no woman’s mouth going hard on my account. Nothing at all.
On the third day I stood at the head of the steps below the Court for forty minutes and let people go past me, and I did it on purpose.
The lean, the hand opening. The thing I hadn’t done on purpose since I was twenty-six, except that once at the fish rail for Elias, which hardly counts, since he’s the one man alive it’s never worked on.
A boy carrying a net glanced up, briefly, the way you’d glance at someone standing too near a doorway.
Then he walked round me.
I stayed where I was with my hand still half open, like a woman who’s held out a coin and been told, very politely, no thank you, he’s quite all right.
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I went back to the room on the western terrace and shut the door.
I didn’t make it to the bed. About four feet in, my legs quit, and I sat down on the floor with my back to the door and both hands over my mouth, the way I had on the shingle, and cried for the best part of an hour.
It was ugly and huge, and I couldn’t have told you then what it was for, and I’m still not sure now.
Some of it was relief. Nineteen years of walking into rooms braced, and here were rooms where nothing happened, and the rest of it alone could have made me weep.
But under that.
The Influence has been the worst thing in my life.
It’s also been, since I was fifteen, the first thing anybody noticed about me.
I hated it and planned my days round it and built an entire self out of managing it: the dry mouth, the sharp answer, the chair with its back to the wall.
All of those grew round a stake, the way a tree grows round a fence post.
Pull the stake out and the tree’s still that shape.
At some point the crying ran out and I lay on my side on the floor with my knees drawn up, and a thought turned up in the plainest words it could find and sat down and wouldn’t leave. I don’t know what I’m like.
Not what I am. What I’m like. Whether I’m funny, or kind. Whether the thing people call my hardness is mine or scar tissue, and whether there’s anything underneath it, and whether everyone who’d ever told me who I was had really been describing the stake.
Thirty-four years old, on the floor of a borrowed room two hundred fathoms down, and I couldn’t name one true thing about myself that I hadn’t learned with that gift standing in the room. I never asked for it. I’d have liked, just once, to be introduced without it.
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On the sixth day I got lost on purpose.
I’d been shown things for five days. Threnn had walked me up the eastern shoulder and Kael had walked me down to the vents and I’d been presented at the Court, and every inch I’d seen of that city I’d seen at somebody’s elbow, with commentary.
So on the sixth morning I left the western terrace and turned the way nobody had taken me, and kept turning that way, for four hours.
This is the Deep when nobody’s explaining it.
Below the third terrace there’s a stretch where the light comes up through the floor instead of off the walls, because a vent runs right underneath, and the floor’s thin enough there to be see-through in patches.
People cross it without looking down. I stood on it for twenty minutes and watched shapes slide by under my own feet, six or eight feet below, slow and not caring, some of them longer than a boat.
There’s a place where four of the grown towers have met at the base over the centuries and made something that isn’t a room and isn’t a street, a sort of vaulted knot of walls, and somebody long ago decided that’s where you sell fish.
Two hundred people, extremely loud, the chord of the city knocked clean off its head by the shape of the place.
And a smell, a good one, clean and metallic and green.
I bought something and ate it standing up.
Nobody looked at me. The very same thing that had gutted me on the third day was, in a fish market on the sixth, the best hour I’d had in a month.
Two hundred people, my mouth full, nobody on earth knowing where I was, and not one head turning my way.
I chewed, or took, or whatever it is you do, and thought about nothing whatsoever, and it was lovely.
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There are children everywhere, and they’re appalling.
They swim. That’s all it is, and it had never occurred to me.
The grown ones walk, as we do, because the city’s built for walking and I suppose there’s some dignity in it.
The children haven’t agreed to any of that.
They go over your head in packs of six at tremendous speed with no regard for anybody.
One of them hit me. Properly hit me: a boy of about seven, going flat out, clipped my shoulder hard enough to spin me round and then stopped dead ten feet on, with his face doing what a child’s face does while it works out how much trouble it’s in.
I laughed. He looked flabbergasted, as if nobody had ever laughed at him for it before, and maybe nobody had. Then he was off like a fish.
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And there are places where it’s gone wrong, and nobody points them out to you.
I found one on the way back, in the lower third: a terrace of about forty dwellings with the gold light gone thin and yellowish inside them, and I heard it before I saw it.
The chord was off. It wasn’t flat and sour, the way the northern quarter would turn out to be when I finally went there.
It wobbled. The note kept trying to settle and couldn’t.