The Winged City, page 1
December 1, 2010 Vol 1 No 2
The Winged City
by Yoon Ha Lee
When General Minkhir returned through the Winged City’s gates, her clay servant Chukash saw the emblem of conquest in her hand. This time it was a bronze crescent, drenched in blood as always. Chukash fell in beside her, holding a basin to catch the blood. The trees to either side of them straightened, the gray-brown limbs flushing to a green-tinged hue, but the street was as dry as it had been before the general’s departure weeks earlier. It was an inauspicious sign when the city’s need for water was still dire.
Chukash kept his head lowered all the way to the temple called the White Bowl. He counted the drops of blood, the red splashes before the basin absorbed all traces of death, or life, or anything human. He liked to think that the blood-beat was his pulse, and that it made him more human.
One time he had stumbled, spilling a drop of blood. It had left a mark on the road like a toeprint. Sometimes the toe on his left foot ached. The general had never reprimanded him for it, but he knew. And the city with its thousand eyes knew.
Of the city’s three-and-three generals, they said that Minkhir had the coldest heart. She did not spare children or the mothers of children. She salted the small springs of the landbound little gods. In the years of his service, Chukash had never seen the general weep.
“Look,” Minkhir said, coming to a halt. Chukash looked up. “It is still not enough.”
Water flowed around the White Bowl. The sacred brook ran around or through each of the city’s temples, fed by the clouds the city swallowed in its orbit.
The brook was rimmed by the brown stubs of flowers. They crunched underfoot as Minkhir crossed the brook to make her offering. From the shaded huts, Chukash could hear the mournful hymns, betraying the priests’ disappointment. They already knew the offering, even of an entire vanquished city, would not suffice to restore water to the city.
Minkhir whispered the names of the Queen of Jewels, the sky goddess, while Chukash tilted the basin over the holy stone. Drink, O Queen, Chukash thought. Nothing happened, no blood or dew or storm from sky above.
For over a century it had been thus, only conquest, cloud-harvest, and pillage compensating for the city’s dwindling stores of water.
Minkhir gazed at the Bowl. Then she bent the bronze crescent and flung it to the ground, where it stopped bleeding. There was an appalled silence.
Shaking, Chukash reached for the crescent. The Queen of Jewels regarded him not, so his touch upon the offering meant for her did not offend her. The general forestalled him. Their hands met momentarily. Hers was warm, sheened with sweat. His was neither.
The priests recovered their song. Had it been within their purview, one of them would have cursed the general for her impudence. The general’s honor guard, standing a respectful distance from the temple, shifted restlessly.
Minkhir turned on her heel and rejoined the guard. She handed the crescent to one, who paled but accepted it. Its edges left white blotches on his skin. The blotches would spread in days to come, as the crescent’s curse consumed him.
Afterwards, the general withdrew to be cleansed by oil and scented water. Chukash stood watch. He was not human, not quite alive; purifying rituals did not need to be performed on him.
Minkhir inspected her hands. Scars blotted out some of the fingerprints, while others exaggerated the whorls. She said, “There is not much time left. Say it, Chukash.”
Steam rose between them. “Water,” he said. “The Winged City thirsts.”
“Oh, yes.” She was looking elsewhere. “We weren’t content with our lands and roads. We had to raise the White Road so we could take to the sky and raid our earthbound neighbors, and feed the road to feed our city.”
He had not realized that the White Road, the sky road, had not always been a part of the city. He knew little of beginnings. It was not fitting for a man of clay to study history. “Which of the Crescent Cities did you conquer this time, General?” he asked.
Minkhir pulled a comb through her hair. It fell to the small of her back, rumpled where it had been braided beneath her helmet. “That is the trouble,” she said. “It was Eguru Ut, the fairest of the Crescent Cities. Do you know the songs?”
Chukash did. The impossible garden arch from which fruit fell into the baskets of widows. The wild horses who came to your hand if you played a certain song upon a flute. The three-tiered market square, the learned men and women, the oracle born underwater.
“No,” said Minkhir, “don’t sing.” Song was holy, and he was not. “It’s gone. Its people have only clay to eat and dust to drink.”
I am clay with dust for blood, thought Chukash. I do not drink.
She saw something in his eyes, although she took no offense from it. “It is simpler for you,” she said. “Stop feeding the White Road, you might say. Return the city to the earth. Do not pour the libations of wine and blood to the three goddesses, do not feed the White Bowl. But our people have become accustomed to exotic comforts. We will get them by traveling the White Road, and we will get them by conquest.” She paused to untangle a lock of hair. “Eguru Ut was fair, yet its people produced nothing we cannot procure from other realms. So it had to perish. Others will follow.”
Minkhir had maps of clay, so detailed that Chukash almost felt he had walked these faraway places. “There are only two of the Crescent Cities left,” he said. Over the years he had watched as Minkhir and her staff prepared the battle plans, and later as they tallied the spoils.
“Yes. I will meet with the rest of the three-and-three tomorrow,” said Minkhir, “and after that, with the little queen. I will march the White Road again to the Crescent to ravage their living cities for our dying one.”
Chukash looked upon her in bewilderment. The three-and-three had many responsibilities, but had Minkhir always regarded hers so bitterly?
He thought suddenly: If she questions her duty, must I question mine?
She looked back. “I tell you this, man who is not human, because you will come with me. Perhaps the gods will listen to you when they have not listened to us. Perhaps they will take pity on someone who has no heart with which to feel greed.”
“It is heresy.” Clay was not flesh, nor would it ever be the equal of flesh. Clay was the food of the dead.
“Maybe heresy will awaken the gods.”
Chukash wished for reassurance, but she had none for him. She turned around and finished combing her hair. Her servants came in to replace Chukash. Damp from the steam, he took his place among the ponderous amphorae and eyeless statuary.
Of all the generals, two were women and four were men. The first of the three-and-three, General Tambere, appeared in luxurious folds of dyed linen and wool. She loved her pleasures. Death was one of them.
Raguor, Ojidan, Akenkeran, and Khetur wore more formal attire, cloaks sewn with bronze scales. Ojidan, the sixth of the three-and-three, had also brought an unhuman, this one shaped like a girl with a bird’s head. Whisperer, he called it. It played the lyre, but did not sing, and it was not sacred the way musicians were.
Chukash stood at General Minkhir’s side and across from Whisperer. If you spoke, he thought, you would have a proper name. Whisperer never spoke. Perhaps it was a proper thing of clay who carried within it all the secret, vulnerable places of the human body without desiring them for itself.
Minkhir spoke first. “The little queen will meet us backed by the priests. This I know.”
Raguor smiled. “Another failure in the Crescent?”
“Hardly that. They are dividing our plunder as we speak.”
“After your soldiers besotted themselves with their portion?”
She made a dismissive sound. “They are soldiers. It is what comforts them. It is better than thinking about our problem.”
“So we say it,” said Tambere. “Water.” She smiled at Chukash. He could smell the oils she had anointed herself with, musk and dark frankincense. “The thing that melts clay.”
“The thing that makes clay fertile,” said Akenkeran, the Quiet One.
Raguor scoffed. “The trees along the promenade are green again, for the moment. But our city’s wings fly too close to the starry palace of the Queen of Jewels, and our fields are parched. Our throats will be next. The first bastard–blessed be his name–should never have raised the city from its foundations.”
The three-and-three, as well as Whisperer and Chukash, made the sign of the circle to ward off the city’s founder’s wrath.
“No water is enough,” said Tambere. “No deaths are enough, and we have brought many. Each time we march through the doors of the sky, we reach lands our cartographers never imagined. Each time the conquest leaves our gods parched. They are thirsty. I am thirsty.” She flung an untasted cup of wine to the floor. The rivulet dampened Chukash’s feet.
Water, he thought. No true water in me.
The city was becoming like him, an unhuman, trickle by trickle.
It was a bad sign when truth became heresy.
“We win all the more,” said Raguor, “and the eaters of bread and drinkers of beer grow fat and content. They don’t care that their city is dying of thirst if it is not dead yet.”
“That was true of their grandmothers and grandfathers,” said Ojidan. “Why should that have changed?” He turned to Minkhir. “The singers at the White Bowl were certain?”
Whisperer’s head swiveled. The alien bird-eyes met Chukash’s. Chukash remembered the buds of weeds at his heels and the sudden absence of li
Minkhir laid her hand on Chukash’s shoulder. “You mean the absence of signs? Yes. Tell them, Chukash.”
He said, “The general bent the crescent token of Eguru Ut, fairest of the Crescent Cities, and cast it on the ground. The singing sisters faltered, but the goddess heard nothing and did nothing in retribution.”
“Who are you to say what a goddess hears?” Khetur said.
“It is the same with the Gray Mouth,” said Ojidan. “The Queen of Hymns accepts our offerings. We send our dead to walk the Gray Road as everyone does in the end. But nothing changes. For all the blood spilled in her name, she gives us no water.”
“It is the same with the red,” Akenkeran said. The Red Road was the road of the earthbound world, with its small gods. Chukash knew little of its ruling goddess, the Red Woman, save that she wandered the world due to her brother’s death.
“Then we must turn our armies upon the last of the Crescent Cities,” said Tambere.
“We must attack as one,” said Raguor, who laughed even now. “The procession will be a sight to see. When have the three-and-three marched side by side?”
Tambere said, “We must present this to the little queen tomorrow morning, and we must speak as one.”
They fell silent, for the little queen had peculiar whims. If the whim took her, she might order them to less fruitful pursuits.
Ojidan nodded toward Chukash. “Sister, how will you convince the priests to bless your army when you plan to bring a man of clay with you?”
“I will bow myself before them,” said Minkhir. “And I will offer myself as–”
“I forbid it!” General Tambere stood, hand upon the whip at her belt. “You will not set the worth of one of the three-and-three equal to that of a mere man of clay.”
Tambere struck Minkhir across one cheek, then the other. Minkhir blinked but made no other motion. Tambere said, “Sister, let go this madness. If it’s a folly of passion”–beside her, Khetur coughed–”why, I have three-and-three comely servants for your pleasure, and none of them have sown fertile seed in my belly, as the priests promised.” Her tone was sly.
“It is neither passion nor folly,” said Minkhir coolly. “Have we forgotten necessity? When the old bastard gave the city wings, there was no more need of men of clay to guard our walls. So they became a curiosity. We are not small; we are a growing sore. Men of clay do not drink. I say we bleed for the Queen of Hymns and replace our dead with living clay. Chukash will be the first.”
Chukash was aware of their eyes upon him. General, he thought, I will do whatever you ask, but please do not put yourself in danger.
“You are monstrous,” said Raguor.
“It is possible,” said Akenkeran.
Ojidan tapped his fingers against his knee. “The little queen will decide. Is there any question of that?”
There was not. Tambere lingered until Minkhir made ready to leave. Tambere said to Chukash, “We will weep no tears for you when you fall.” Her voice held the bite of malice.
Minkhir said, “He is clay. Your words are nothing to him. He is mine, sister.”
“You were always monstrous,” said Tambere, and let them pass.
The little queen had no name. Her face changed from generation to generation. Her ancestor had raised the city upon its three massive wings. So long as the line survived, the city would remain skyborne.
Chukash had only seen two of the queens. They were alike in visage, unlike in manner. The previous one had attended his birth, for only she could approve the making of men of clay. She had made nervous motions when his senses awakened from the inert dust that wrapped his skin. By then she had been very old, engulfed by the cloth-of-gold and diadem of her rank, and the lines around her mouth were deep but kind.
This queen was no taller. People whispered that the blood was thinning again, that the next queen would have to be drawn from another branch of the tree. No one would have suggested this to the previous queen; even less this one, with her rapacious eyes and honey-poisoned voice. Chukash feared her.
The three-and-three were as dust motes in the little queen’s court. She sat upon a dais carved with birds that Chukash did not recognize. She wore three-and-three bracelets of different metals upon her left arm, and three rings in her left ear, and three rings in the right.
Assembled to either side were the high priests of the white and gray, and a seer of the red. Oracles knelt at the little queen’s feet, their hair shorn and their eyes glazed with drugged wisdom. And more: sacred musicians with feathers in their hair; a man who stood on his hands and capered for the little queen’s pleasure; children sitting with silent women.
The sun was hot after a hard day’s campaigning, but the sun did not have the little queen’s searching eyes. Minkhir turned to Chukash. “Leave,” she said. “Depart this hall of halls. You have seen too much already. I will argue my case as I can.”
“Folly, sister, folly,” said Khetur.
Chukash went. The queen’s guards let him leave without comment. The servants in the halls hardly marked him. Puzzled, Chukash stood beneath a bas-relief of the gods. He had not known there were so many besides the Queen of Jewels, the Queen of Hymns, and the Red Woman. There was also the Half-Faced Archer, who was Night’s consort, and the Bird With No Eyes, who was a messenger when it pleased him and a trickster otherwise. They were at war in the relief. Cities and ordinary people were tiny in comparison, besieged by fire and storm, great swords and fierce-faced charioteers.
For some time he searched the wall for a likeness of the Red Woman’s slain brother, some explanation of why he had died or what had become of him, but found none.
Chukash heard a sound like feathers against cloth. It was Whisperer. It gestured across the strings of its lyre, plucking an octave. Chukash followed it down the hall.
Whisperer made a whistling noise. One of the tapestries puckered slightly. Behind it lay a dark passage. Chukash and Whisperer entered. No one stopped them.
When the dim light from the opening gave out, their footsteps began to make soft sucking sounds. The touch of mud thrilled through Chukash. He stopped. He could see in the darkness, which had never been true before. Whisperer followed him, now.
A voice called through the passageway. Its echoes were three-and-three. “How many do you bring, men of clay?”
Whisperer plucked a single string. Chukash said, “An army.”
“Hush,” said the voice, waking more echoes.
As the echoes died, they heard the tumult of the little queen’s court. Chukash could discern General Minkhir’s voice. Whisperer plucked the string again. Perhaps it heard Ojidan.
“Yes,” said the voice. Its source was moving. “You,” it said, “you are here because your master ordered it.” Whisperer made a low trilling sound. “And you,” it said to Chukash, “you are here because your master did not forbid it.”
The voice came from a face upon the wall–no, a face beyond the wall–no, from some unseen hall.
“Man of clay,” said Chukash. “My master calls me Chukash.” He had to say it; the general would not have him go unclaimed.
“My master calls me many things,” said the voice. “You knew the way here, Whisperer. Chukash. Do you know why?”
Whisperer, who might know, could not tell him. It plucked another octave. Chukash did not know.
A wavering light moved over the wall with its paintings of ancient creatures. Between each was the impression of a face. Chukash felt a clenching sensation, which made him aware of the false heart inside him, the false liver, the unnecessary skeleton: an impression of a human from the inside out.
Whisperer moved its fingers over the lyre’s strings. The bird-eyes held a welling longing.
You cannot fly and you cannot speak, thought Chukash. He said to the voice, “Why?”
One of the faces rippled; a mouth opened. Clay moved, reshaped itself into another face. Chukash felt himself growing inert, one more piece of clay in a place of clay. In that stillness he felt the shape of his maker’s handprint emerging outward from heart to skin. Because this was not pain he bore for the general’s sake, he cried out.
Whisperer bowed before Chukash, graceful in the way of water birds. It set down its lyre, heedless of the mud. With precise hands, it unclasped Chukash’s tunic to reveal the handprint. Whisperer picked up a pinch of clay and smeared it over Chukash’s chest. In a moment the handprint vanished.
