The City of Woven Streets

CHAPTER TWO

The girl’s hand is narrow in the grip of Alva’s fingers, the angles of her bones sharp around the dent of her palm. I am aware of Alva’s and Weaver’s attention, a tense net around me. But I have done this countless times before. I turn the perception inside out, as if I am focusing my eyes on something close by and letting the background soften into a haze where all boundaries are unclear. I look at the letters as if they are mere contours and colours in a landscape, akin to cracks in the walls of houses, or the black and green algae growing in the canals.

I turn to look at Weaver, taking care not to let my face reveal a thing.

‘What does it say?’ I ask.

Weaver does not answer immediately. Her gaze perseveres in the dusk, but I do not shiver under it.

‘Has your brother not taught you anything?’ she asks.

‘He never thought it necessary,’ I respond.

Weaver is still looking at me when Alva says, ‘Eliana, someone tattooed your name on this girl’s palm in invisible ink.’

I let my face and body react as they should. They adjust to the situation. I know what Weaver reads on them: surprise, confusion, just the right amount of alarm.

‘I don’t know her,’ I say. ‘I’ve never seen her before.’

‘Eliana is not a common name,’ Weaver says.

It is true. I am the only one in the House of Webs, although there must be others on the island.

‘Maybe it’s her name,’ I suggest. ‘Have you asked?’

Alva sighs.

‘Of course I did. And no, it’s not her name. Or so she claims, at least.’

‘Quite a coincidence,’ Weaver says. She turns to Alva. ‘This is no ordinary tattoo.’

‘No,’ Alva says.

She covers the glow-glass with a towel, reaches for the window and parts the curtain slightly. The early-morning light floats into the room, settles on the girl’s skin. The letters turn invisible. Her palm looks no different than mine; only a few lines and callouses are discernible on it.

‘Interesting,’ Weaver says. ‘I have not seen one of those before.’

‘Neither have I,’ Alva says.

She lets the curtain fall back to cover the window and removes the towel from the top of the glow-glass. My gaze turns towards the letters as their outlines slowly grow visible. They run across the narrow lines on the girl’s palm, towards the fingers closed around my name, as if to keep it safe. Alva places the girl’s hand back on the blanket.

‘We must let her sleep.’ Alva’s voice is firm.

Weaver turns to face me.

‘You may return to your room,’ she says. ‘I will let the City Guard know about this as soon as the watergraph is working again.’

I bow my head slightly in acknowledgement of the order.

‘And keep me up to date about her condition,’ Weaver says to Alva.

The girl’s eyes crack open and close again. Her breathing flows calm and even. The pain seems to be gone for now, and the bleeding has stopped. Very gently Alva coaxes the girl’s mouth open, holds the towel and the glass jar against her skin and pulls the medusa out. Its lifeless weight drops into the jar, where the bright-red blood tendrils begin to spread through the water cradling its dead body.

Alva picks up the cup from the night table. We turn to go.

After the warmth of the sick bay, the morning is cold around us. Weaver stops a few footsteps ahead of me.

‘I don’t expect you in the Halls of Weaving until this afternoon,’ she says.

I am grateful that she remembers. It is nearly time for the morning gong. I bow. Weaver nods at me and continues towards the building where the Halls of Weaving are located. I suspect she sleeps even less than I do. The incoming day is unfolding on the horizon, and for a moment I am alone under the sky of the house.

The cell is cool and silent. The thick curtain lets in a thread-slender rectangle of light around the edges of the window. I turn the key in the lock and shake the glow-glass on the table. As the water inside the globe moves and wakes up the algae, the shine begins to grow. In the dim light I examine my skin from head to toe more carefully than usual. The back is always the most difficult; there is no mirror. I find nothing apart from the perpetual callouses on my fingertips and soles. I look for clean clothes to wear and fold the dirty ones into a pile I will carry into the laundry room later. I can sense the faint scent of Alva’s brew on them: herbs that bring sleep and rest. Perhaps I should have asked Alva to mix me a similar potion. She would have said no at first, but then done it anyway.

I sit on the bed until the morning gong begins to echo in the stone walls and vibrate on the webs.

I walk together with the weavers who are on unravelling duty and on their way to work in the web-maze today. It is said on the island that the district of the House of Webs is mapless, a shapeshifter: careless travellers never find their way out if they wander too deep. Yet the weavers know the way. The three solid buildings of the house are surrounded by a zone where the streets and buildings are formed only by woven webs hung between stone pillars, seemingly arbitrary narrow alleys and dead ends. It is here that strangers will lose their way, and sometimes weavers too, when they have not yet learned how the routes are shaped and transformed. Here, walls are unravelled as soon as they are completed and woven anew somewhere else when they have ceased to be. Everything follows a predetermined order, yet you must hold the exact keys to it in order to perceive it.

As I draw further from the heart of the House of Webs, stone fences grow onto the landscape almost unnoticeably. The city no longer flits and filters light everywhere, but takes a more solid shape. Amidst the soft view of yarn frayed on the edges rise stairways covered in dark algae, walls eaten by humidity and whole houses with no woven parts. Eventually all of the maze is left behind: a city of stone where the work of weavers does not belong swallows the walker. The canals flow brown in the chasms among the buildings, and gondolas rise and fall between water and air. None of the other weavers come to the city with me.

The banks of Halfway Canal are still burst and rippling. The pavements have been claimed by water, and I have to climb up steps cut on the outer wall of a tall building to one of the rope bridges that are lowered from rooftops during floods. The bridge wobbles under my footsteps. There is a small crowd standing at the far end, waiting for their turn to cross. Below, people are wading in water, some of them in high-leg oiled leather boots, others barefoot. They are all scooping up something limp and leaf-like, placing armfuls of it in half-drowned wheelbarrows and small boats and large baskets. At first I think it is just seaweed, not the web-thin algae used in glow-glasses, but a leafy variety that grows deeper. Floods often throw large amounts of it across the island.

The bridge comes to an end and I begin to climb towards the next one. I have to cross a high rooftop, and there I stop. Usually this would cause pushing and shoving and protests, a rush that tries everyone’s patience. But today there are others beside me who have stopped on the roof to stare at the sea and the rising tide that is slowly swallowing the shores.

At first it looks as if the waves are bubbling, or growing soft scales, translucent and circular. Their surfaces turn coarser, their density different. When the first wave carrying the dead weight crashes onto the rocks, I am not certain. When the second one does, I could not be wrong if I wanted to, and I understand the people with their baskets and boats, the scooping movements of their hands.

The sea is carrying dead singing medusas to the island, throwing them to the shores and driving them into the canals. Their bodies lie quiet and lifeless, only cradled by the movement of the water. There are thousands, tens of thousands of them, each one as alone as the others, each one as unable to sing ever again.

I think of the medusas in Alva’s tank, of their soft rippling. I wonder if they know, if they sing their farewells to the lost ones.

I climb down the other side of the rooftop and fit my steps to the unsteady planks of the next rope bridge.

The rooftops are crowded and the flooding streets too, as always on the Ink-marking days. The sound of a seashell horn soars above the rooftops from the Tower, inviting city-dwellers to gather. A steady stream of people moves towards the museum. I choose a circuitous route I know to be more quiet. On the way I must cross a square bordered by porticos on each side. The ground is a little higher here, the stones humid only from fog and drizzle. A small group of black-clad people is gathered in the square. There are maybe five or six of them. They stand there as a dark and silent front, like rain on the horizon. I recognize the mourning garb immediately. Many families of Dreamers hide their shame, but some wish to remember those they have lost.

As I am crossing the square, one of them detaches herself from the group and walks towards me. I turn my gaze downwards, trying to ignore her. She walks past me, so close it is more a push than a brush. She drops something to the ground. I hear a faint clink and before I know it, I have stepped on the item without even looking.

A guard is there in an instant. I had not noticed him. Neither had the woman, probably taking a bigger risk than she had intended. But he has seen the sea-green coat of the House of Webs on me, he has seen the woman’s black garb. He will have drawn his own conclusions. The guard grabs the woman by the arm, his fingers hard and tight.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he tells her. Then he turns to me. ‘Did she bother you in any way? Try to give you anything, say anything inappropriate?’

I stare at the woman. Her face is expressionless, mask-like. If I say yes, she will be in trouble. Perhaps all of them will be, the group standing behind me, wordless and unmoving. Their eyes are on us. If I say no and the guard notices the item she dropped, I may be in trouble, whether I am from the House of Webs or not. I can feel a flat surface through the thin sole of my shoe. The item is small enough to be hidden from sight until I move. I do not even know what it is.

‘No,’ I say. ‘She did nothing. I wasn’t looking where I was going and walked into her.’ I direct my next words at the woman. ‘It was entirely my fault. I apologize.’

The woman nods. If she is surprised, she hides it well.

The guard relaxes his grip on the woman’s arm.

‘Be more careful next time,’ he tells her. ‘Your kind have no business bothering folk from the Houses of Crafts.’ The woman does not move. ‘On your way then,’ the guard orders.

The woman begins to walk towards the group, slowly at first, then accelerating her steps. The guard looks after her.

‘If you ask me, her sort should be thrown into the House of the Tainted along with their family members,’ he says. ‘Who knows if they are clean, either.’ He glances at me. ‘Good day to you, Miss Weaver.’

I nod at the guard. He nods back, then turns away. I wait until he is close to the other side of the square, taking his post in the shadows between the pillars.

I tug at the string that ties a small leather pouch to my belt. The pouch falls. The coins inside clink against each other. I deliberately avoid glancing in the direction of the guard. If he is looking at me, he will simply see me pick up my coin pouch which I had tied in place carelessly. He will not see me move my foot and take the item from under my shoe. I have time to feel cold metal in my fingers before I slip it into the pouch with the coins. The guard will find me clumsy. He will find me unsuspicious.

The group in mourning on the edge of the square will see something else, but they will not tell. Not if I do not.

The Museum of Pure Sleep has always reminded me of a sea monster, the kind described in children’s tales. The statues standing on its roof rise tentacle-like against the sky, ready to reach and grab and pull down into the abyss anything that comes their way. The round windows gleam orange and blue, and sometimes shadows close to cover them like eyelids, to let the sleep in. But never the dreams.

I plunge into the stream of people. The steps are slippery and wide under my feet, their edges rounded and worn hollow by the weight of all who have climbed them. The throng is already suffocating me. I sense the warmth and movements of human bodies forced too close together, their smells and impatience. Before me, I see other museum visitors disappear into a portico. The columns in front of the entrance shine pale as teeth against the dark stone-skin of the building.

I walk into the monster’s mouth.

It is always dim at first. I join one of the four long queues. They all trickle towards checkpoints where men in uniforms guard the gates. The light only begins beyond the iron bars dropping down vertically from the tall ceiling. There, I can see a group of visitors that has stopped on the landing halfway up the coral-red staircase. The skylight casts brightness upon them, separating them from us.

My eyes focus on the bars again. They look like the weft of an enormous wall-web. I imagine a giant hand passing a warp through them.

When my turn finally comes, I show the guard my birth tattoo. A cold draught brushes the hair of my neck. Although I checked my skin this morning, my breath runs tight as I pull up my sleeves and wait. Every year I fear that the guard will find more on my skin than the lines tattooed on my arm. Yet he counts the tattoos with the customary bored expression on his face and nods. He checks the house-tattoo on my other arm, finds my name on a list and draws a mark next to it. He opens the gate to let me through and closes it again before beginning to examine the next citizen. Two new groups are already gathering around the guides at the bottom of the staircase. I join the group appointed for me.

Blood coral, amber and tapestries woven from dyed yarn glow around us, making the light pouring from the skylight grow and burst into flames. We wait until the previous group has disappeared into a room at the top of the stairs. The guide asks us to follow. We all know where to go.

We walk across the entrance hall and climb halfway up the staircase, where we stop. The guide begins to talk and gestures towards the large mural on the wall above the top landing. Our gazes are turned to it, but I might as well be looking through a window, not noticing the unevenness of its surface or the stains left on it by weather. I have seen the mural too many times. Even as a child I did not like it. The tall Tower in the middle frightened me, as did the eight masked figures standing in front of it. I told my mother they were ghosts. She placed a hand over my mouth and ordered me to be quiet. I still remember the looks the guide and the other visitors gave me.

It was only later that I understood how afraid my mother was then. My words could easily have been interpreted as an indication that it was common in my family to speak of the Council in blasphemous tones. But the image had come of its own volition and had not originated from my parents’ conversations. With their black cloaks and featureless, blood-coloured masks, the mural-Council looked like an image of death in my child’s eyes.

The guide’s story about how the Council ended the Reverie Revolution, purged the island of Dreamers and restored peace and prosperity to our city is the same every year. I know parts of it by heart. And thus dream-plague was banished from our midst, with those spreading it sent to colonies or enclosed within walls where their disease could be contained. Night-maeres ceased to roam free and fled to the dark places they had come from, never to emerge again except for the cursed few who carried them within their blood.

The group keeps their eyes fixed on the mural while the guide speaks. I take quick glances at the people around me. There is a young mother with two children. I wonder which one of them is here for the Ink-marking. I hope it is not one of the children; although if not today, they will have to endure the pain when their time comes. There is an old man in a grey waistcoat and brown jacket, with a powdery white stain on his dark trousers. A baker, perhaps. Another man is clearly from the Ink Quarters: his hands are tarnished with black and red dye. Several young women are among the group, wearing bonnets and dresses made from slightly finer fabric, and skilfully polished bone coral pendants. Daughters of merchants, I think.

I notice a man glancing down to the entrance hall over his shoulder, as if searching for something. He is not young any more, and there is nothing about his looks that gives away his craft. Grey trousers, a brown hooded jacket, worn boots. No stains on fingers. Hair tied neatly to the nape of the neck with a leather ribbon, his hands clasped behind his back. He returns his gaze to the mural. The sky above shifts, the light falling from the glass ceiling burns deeper and hits the man’s hand mere steps away from me.

The hollow of his palm bears a strange, gondola-shaped scar. It is wider in the middle, narrowing towards the ends.

I raise my gaze before anyone sees me staring.

As we walk up the staircase and proceed to the next room, I notice the man looking around again with the same searching face. I also notice something else: he is careful about the way he does it. Before looking away, he pays close attention to the guide and only turns his gaze for the briefest moment when he believes he will not be seen.

A guard with a short spear stands beside one of the walls. His uniform carries the sun-emblem of the Council and the City Guard. The man’s eyes stop on him, then return to the pictures on the walls the guide is talking about. These too are words I have heard before. Once the island was a tangle of forest with wild beasts inhabiting it: a cruel and dangerous place where a man could easily be lost and never found again. But our ancestors brought their torches and swords to drive the beasts away, and with heroic courage and suffering great losses they laid the first foundations of the city we know today. From the cradle of the sea they harvested silkweed and blood coral, and they took their ships across wide waters and established the first trading routes, which you can see on these maps.

We continue to walk through rooms filled with images of the past: weavers and scribes at work, the building of the Tower, codices spread on the square for the annual Word-incineration. I keep an eye on the man with the scarred palm. In each room he glances around as soon as he has entered, before turning his focus on the guide.

We reach the room I have always liked the least. Glow-glasses hanging from the ceiling light the windowless space. The guide points to a picture on the wall, showing the bodies of those dead from dream-plague being burned. But there are more than paintings here. Glass cases hold medical instruments made from coral, both bone white and blood red. Their points and blades are sharp, their jaws wide and hard. Thick, spread-open books lie next to them under the glass. The illustrations show skin lesions and bulbous growths where the limbs meet the torso, like darkness boiling under the skin.

The man with the scarred palm has stopped in front of a painting portraying a young woman. She is lying on a bed with her eyes closed, a hand fallen towards the floor over the edge of the bed. Her lips are cracked open in an anxious arc. A dark shadow sits upon her chest with hands reaching for the woman’s neck: a night-maere visiting a Dreamer. The man pulls his hand out of his pocket and scratches his head.

That is when I see it. It is a mere glimpse, but I am certain that it is there.

A tattoo glows white on his palm, where the scar was. I do not have time to discern any details, but the shape is similar to the scar’s: elongated, pointy at each end.

He pushes the hand back into his pocket.

The image rises within me like water: the injured girl’s hand holding the letters of my name.

As in all the other rooms, there is a guard in here, too. When the guide urges us to move on, the guard steps closer to the group and speaks.

‘You,’ he says to the man. ‘Halt.’

The man freezes. An alarmed expression appears on his face. He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out.

‘You may continue,’ the guard tells the guide. ‘This man will join you after I have had a word with him.’

The guide gives a bow. We walk after him to the next room. I glance behind. The guard is speaking to the man in a low voice and quick words I cannot hear, his face less stern than I would have expected. They both notice me looking. The guard’s lips stop moving. The room begins to fill with new visitors. I turn my head and follow the group.

No one speaks after we exit the final room and walk down the staircase. This is the way the tour is designed. First the monster swallows you, then it digests you and eventually you come out of the other end feeling filthy.

The exit hall resembles the entrance. We have to queue for the gates in the iron-bar wall again. Only here the queue is slower and stretches all the way outside. I look at the others who have come to receive their annual tattoos. Many of them have brought families and friends, and some of them will be throwing parties today. But even they must first come to the Ink-marking. No one on the island avoids that.

As I scan the space, I spot the man with a scar on his hand again. He has taken his place in another queue a little ahead of me. Dozens of glow-glass globes hanging from the ceiling paint the space blue. The man clasps his hands behind his back. His palm turns up. I expect to see his tattoo again.

It is not there.

The distance is long enough that I may not discern the scarring, but I am certain that I would see the glowing tattoo. He was not standing further away from me in the room where I first noticed it. But now his palm is bare, his skin without any markings.

I almost move to join the same queue with him, try to find a reason to talk to him. But the queue proceeds and people flow between us, a whole open sea, impossible to cross. I lose sight of him.

The exit opens to a square on the other side of which the Tower rises larger than I remember, a storm-grey column against a blue sky. The sun glistens dimly on its stone surface and the mist has dissipated on the streets. The queues trickle towards the checkpoints and the inkmasters’ tables behind which they meld into the billowing crowd.

I look where I cannot help looking, none of us can.

The Dreamers stand in the middle of the square on a dais, four women and four men. None of them is young. One of the women wears an eyepatch and one of the men is missing a hand. They are barefoot and grey-clad, and the mark of the Tainted is clearly visible on each of their foreheads. A City Guard with a hand on spear-haft has taken a place at each corner of the dais, and at the foot of the dais an entire front of them stands in formation.

The queues reach and move. The autumn-dampened sun pours lukewarm light on faces. The prisoners stand silent, still, have been standing for hours. No one offers them water or food.