Twelve

It’s as though he’s never seen the stars before, the opaque luminosity of the Milky Way, the rapid twinkle of the stars near the horizon, the reds and blues only seen just out of focus from the corner of his eye, each twinkling to white when looked at directly, the occasional sprint of a falling star breaking free of the cacophony, the great girdle binding the sky to the earth, a hero’s embrace.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she asks, gently pulling his arm a little more tightly about her. He leans in and puts his chin on her shoulder, still keeping his eyes on the heavens, his arm about her waist, her sitting between his legs on the roof outside his room.

“I never knew…” he replies, “it was always so hard to see through the smog.”

“They say it’s like this all over the city now. Out in the Reaches you can see almost from one horizon to another, and on a moonless night they say it’s like a sparkling roof laid over the land.”

“Why can we see it now?”

“I heard that since folk are burning more Black Wood there’s less smoky fires, so less smog. Seems to be true though, since the markets are much easier to be in.”

He’d noticed the same on his last few visits through the hawker quarter, with almost all the carts now burning the charcoal; smoky initially, but settling into a smooth, regular heat the hawkers preferred. The food was improving as a result, and more people were choosing to come down to the quarter to eat. His friend the cart jockey, always a reliable source of decent cooking was, as you’d expect, making out like a bandit, with few spots being available at his table, the carpenter resorting to standing at the edge of the awning listening to the seated patrons talk, gossip, or complain.

“Where does it come from again?”

“The Black Wood? They say it comes from out east somewhere. There’s a forest with endless and abundant trees they carefully harvest to make the wood, then it comes down the river on barges to the docks out up by Warehouse Town.”

He sits back a little to look over his shoulder to the east and the rising stars. “Out east,” he remarks, “isn’t that where they say the creeping death is? You know, the poison vines?”

She chuckles a little, “That’s just a bard’s tale, one to scare the rubes in the markets, surely?”

Eleven

He first sees her sitting on the steps of a local library. He notices her hair, a dark brown, short, tucked behind her ears while she devours a slim volume, her hazel eyes making the soft movements of a reader hallucinating a universe into which they’ve fallen. Enraptured, she turns the page with a deliberate and rapid flick, falling back into the tale before the spell is broken. She wears a beflowered summer dress, her knees almost showing above the smooth skin of her shins, her feet tucked into sensible sandals, heels pressed up against the step she’s taken as a perch.

“Good day for it” he says before he can stop himself, and she looks up to meet his eyes, smiles though confused, his stomach twisting as she returns to her prize.

The next he sees her she’s standing just outside his doorway, leaning slightly to look into the gloom of his workshop, her hand resting against the open doorframe, that same summer dress covering her shoulders, with little else showing past the block of the frame. He’s looked up from taking a chisel to rail of a cabinet door, only to see her make a small wave and ask, “Are you the carpenter?”

“Me? Ahhh… yes? Yes! Yes I’m the carpenter here,” he says, smoothing his hair slightly, it refusing his fingers in a raucous mass, dust and shavings making their escape and falling about him, motes reflecting the light of the doorway, “how can I help you Miss?”

She smiles that same smile, an anxiety falling from her shoulders as she steps more fully into the doorway, stopping short of entering the premises without an invitation. “I heard you’re taking on work?”

“Of course!” he replies, cleaning his hands on his apron, “Should we step out into the Courtyard?”

The third time, she sees him as he stoops to look behind some rubbish at the corner of a marketplace. He’s a bent a little sideways looking down to see behind the junk, and glances in her direction by chance. She smiles and waves again, causing him to drop the rubbish with a guilty look before slowly sidling over to where she stands near a hawker’s stand.

There’s little more to say from there. A romance in an uneven cascade of moments; sometimes intense, foreheads pressed together, sweat and breath mingling; sometimes light, sudden laughter at a shared joke, or backs pressed together, each reading a small book or pamphlet. In time he realises he loves her, her back tucked up to his chest, them both hiding beneath a pile of scratchy blankets in his sparse room, the afternoon light fading into evening.

“It’s so cold”, she observes, breathing a small amount of steam, “surely even a carpenter can afford the Black Wood…”

Ten

The problem with serious drinking is, inevitably, the need to fill the spaces between the light of day and dark of oblivion with small tasks, conversations, laughter, and banter, all crammed into a blurring tunnel of time, your awareness fading by the hour as the poison overtakes you, wrapping your consciousness in a fuzzy, slow-motion wall between the real and the imagined. And so it is in the half-light of the bar, itself barely changed since the last time the Carpenter had come looking for his old friend.

Lofty is, as they say, in full flight. His usual habit of gesticulation now borders on a danger to passers-by, his chain smoking turning out a perpetual screen to the gaze of others, within which he and the Carpenter sit talking and laughing.

“Nahnahnahnah man, it’s different to that aeh. Did you ever hear of Clarke? That guy who wrote all them science fiction?

“Nah? Well, good writer aeh, turned out to probably be a pedo, which was a disappoint to his many fans, but hey, he had his moment in the sun and trashed it aeh.

“Anyway, he says summing like ‘If it’s hard out high tech then low-tech just think it’s magic’, or summing… wait… yeah nah it’s summing like this aeh.

“So that’s pretty wicked aeh, ‘cause it means if you’re like, low-tech, and some poncy high tech MF comes on and says ‘ohlalala, I have some science stuff to be all explaining’ and that, then… then low tech will be like ‘woah. How could this MF possibly know all this stuff?!’, aeh?

“So to that high tech guy, like maybe he’s a science guy, or maybe a tech, or, or, summing, it’s all pretty simple to them aeh because it’s in the frame. He’s gone and got all that knowledge, or mebbe it’s just some stuff he learned at school because his high tech peoples are all like, ‘we got all this fancy stuff we do on the daily’, and it’s not a thing to them aeh, it’s just, like, well, their stuff, and mebbe some of them kind of get how it all works but most of them are just like ‘gimme that thing’ because I can use it to call a place to get a footrub delivered or summing…

“Anyhow, give that trinket to a low tech and they’re like ‘what in the actual?’ and prolly just use it to hit a nail or make a paper weight or summing because they don’t know what a button is, aeh? Like, how the hell would you know what a button is if all you do is cut grass to make a shack and eat stuff you killed with a stick? Aeh? Like, how many Zebras you see with buttons on them aeh? Like, ‘push here to make a steak’, aeh? Aeh!”

Cackling, he drops his rolly into an ashtray on the table and pauses to drink before starting to roll another.

“So this stuff you’re talking man, this knowing stuff, aeh, it works for high tech people just as well aeh, because all the stuff they know is still learned from somewhere, like, some geezer has to actually make that knowing and push it out into the world for all them other MF to pick up and run with, aeh? ‘Cause… what did Gibson say…? Yeah yeah yeah, he says, ‘the future is here, just not everyone gets the same size piece’, aeh?

“An that’s where it gets weird, aeh? ‘Cause you get these geezers who can just plain see the future panned out, aeh, like all laid out like a map in their heads, and they just know what’s on the edge of tomorrow, but other people are like, oooh, shiny thing I can drop in my digs and pretty the place up for when I get home from my boring as all get out job pushing buttons that some MF invented and then make that groove in the couch a bit bigger… all because they know that that smart-as MF is just like them, is like, one of them but just talks a lot of bollocks that says summing like ‘I got science that says it’ll rain real bad tomorrow’, which is just boring as all get out, and they don’t care. But man, weather is like this really complicated science, aeh? It’s not looking at guts or reading the bones, aeh, it’s intense…

“Aeh! But that geezer man, if you put him near one of them low tech, they’d be like, ‘whatinthe? How in the heck did this fool know it would be raining and thundering today?!’ and now that geezer is like a prophet or a seer to those low tech rubes and they like make a golden throne for some TV weather man!

“But for every high tech there’s a higher tech aeh? Like, even if you think you’re smart AF and know what you need to know about the world, aeh, then there’s still chances that someone just knows more about the future, just because that future is all bunched up and working its way out to us mooks real slow. So mebbe even high tech have prophets aeh? Mebbe ‘cause two schools of knowing don’t agree, or maybe ‘cause sometimes money or pride gets in the way, whatever, but sometimes what we think we all together know is wrong, and some geezer out on the edge of all this smug, complacent bastardry around us knows the real future, the real way that all and everything will play out, mebbe just because they put all the same pieces we all know together in some way that’s different to the normies, and mebbe it’s the real vision of the way the world works, not the version made up by geezers all reading the same books in the same order, aeh? So they’re like, like, just as ignorant as all them low techs, but tell themselves they just know the reality right, aeh? And it’s not till the end that those other MFs will finally recognise what it is, and that that one weirdo had it right all along…”

As the monologue fades the Carpenter picks up his beer, sips, and looks across the room in thought. “So, how do we wake them up man? How do we switch them on to stuff they can’t know or don’t want to? Is there someone out there, right now, who’s holding back knowing?

“It’s just… it’s just there’s stuff hiding out there aeh, I can feel it, but can’t tell where it’s hiding…”

Lofty lifts his chin a little, looking a little askance across the bridge of his nose at the Carpenter, takes a long drag on his cigarette, before stating, “How do you wake people up if they don’t even know they’re asleep? If they’re sleep-walking through their daze?

“Like, this isn’t The Matrix aeh? There’s no pill for that one… I guess the question is what are you gunna wake them up to? Aeh?”

The Lotus Eaters

The river or the rock they say, which is it that shapes the other? Does the river make smooth the rocks to tumble through the waters on their way to the braided plains, or do the greater rocks nudge the river, too hard to be pushed aside and dragged to the oceans? Does the river fall into the arms of the rocky terraces, a lover’s embrace holding it fast to the long slow descent to the sea? Or does the rock shoulder aside the waters, constraining their freedom, hedging them from the soft soil, lest they drag their own banks out to the flooded river mouth?

Out in the wilderness lives another people, a distant folk who buy their pleasures by fuelling the ovens and lights of the City, its insatiable appetite reaching across field and fen to the edges of the great dark forests of the morning light. The forests, ancient, reach back beyond memory into the old time of the world when the Sun would sprint across the heavens, impatient with youth and ardour to finish his days work, a time long before Maui and his brothers came with club and rope to bind and order the skies, and make the Sun to rotate slowly, slowly, north and south in new seasons.

Then the Children of the Shadows lived lives of the Fey, born in the boughs of their great trees, eating the fruits of the forest, harvesting gardens in the glades and hollows, drinking from the streams shaped by the daily rains, until a new kind of time came to the lands, and the Children were irrevocably drawn into the orbit of the City.

It started slowly enough, traders come looking for the shiny and new, perhaps one or two per season, each seeking seed or novelty, some small thing to provide them an edge in the markets; a dye to colour the cloth of the great houses, animals to amuse the masses in the squares, or tales to sell to Skald and Bard alike.

No one knows who created it first, just that it was made, and with it the face of the forest changed forever. The Black Wood, a charcoal the heart of the great trees, taken by felling and splitting the grandfather trunk into large nuggets, and burning them by night in pits belching smoke and ash.

The Black Wood changed the City in turn, a cheap, lite, and easy energy that took the place of dried manure, detritus, or scattered sticks from the peripheral fields beyond the last houses and small farms. With the trading of the Black Wood the hunger of the people came to the Fey folk like a plague, with it a knowing of the pleasure of the small thing, the trinket and the glossy cover, the cape of consumption folding across and over them, making gems and metals a food, eating their own ancestors and wombs.

And so it was that the light fell for the first time in a God’s age upon the bleaching soils of the forests, and in the cracked and drying earth a small, insipid enemy of the trees found an easy place to root, and grew. Pollenated by the wind, across the open places it crept and spread, its flowers brilliant and alluring, a poison to creatures and insect alike, so dense they smother all and everything, climbing up and over the shrubs and bushes that made shelter for the saplings of the great trees. A beautiful, sweet-scented death, clamouring at the feet of the Fey, devouring their garden and wasteland alike, perhaps the mirror of their hunger, perhaps the consequence.

But still the hunger of the city overtakes them, and the forest falls to make for them delights.

Mouse Knowing

The skill of it is what impresses him the most. The flick of the wrist that sends the dish up and out of the wok. The plunge of the spatula that stirs and controls the movement and orientation of the ingredients. The cook’s eye simultaneously watching the heat, the moisture, the fire, the seasoning, and sauces with the careful precision of repetition and familiarity of task. It’s a love letter to food, repeated daily with subtle chemistry and mystical nuance.

When the cart jockey turns back and drops the bowl he smiles broadly to the carpenter, “You still sniffing around all the wee corners of the place, e hoa?”

He chuckles, “Yeah, nah, some of these habits are hard to break man.” And stuffs noodles into a broad smile.

The jockey tilts his head sideways a little. “What are you finding out there bro?” he asks quietly.

The flash of concern across the carpenter’s brow is brief, but noticeable enough the jockey sees it. A moment’s vulnerability quickly smothered by self-consciousness and fear of embarrassment.

From behind the low counter in the cart the jockey rocks back on his heels a little, “There’s some pretty crazy stuff hiding away in the dark places in this city, aeh?”

The carpenter pauses, looks away to the street, then looks back to his friend, thinks, upwards to the sky. “Do you know that feeling when a map falls open to you?

“Like, not when you open a map, but when a place becomes a place in your mind? So, say you moved to a new neighbourhood aeh. At first you learn a bit about your home. Like, where the bed is relative to the kitchen, or that you can go round the side of the building and there’s the backdoor and now you know what that wall is like from both the inside and the outside?”

“Yeah bro, you get that picture in your mind aeh, and you feel it out from then on.”

“That’s the one aeh. But then after a bit you learn the way from your house to the local shops, and you follow that way for a bit, then you find a shortcut, or you figure out that the other shops are two streets over, and you can work your way through to them too, like you’re exploring out the map of the place?

“Then, at some time after all that wandering around you have this full map of at least some part of the city in your imagination, and it sticks in there and you just know what all the bits are and how they all slot together. And then there’s all these people who make their way around the map in the real world, but they see the map differently aeh? Because they didn’t put all that map together in their heads in the exact same way you did?

“So everyone is bouncing around in this big space carrying their own maps and making changes and memories differently along their own lines, and seeing inside some places that others can’t, and it’s chaotic and muddled, but, all together, it’s a full knowing of the shape of the city both inside and outside?”

He pauses to look back to the jockey, who’s settled back onto the edge of the counter near the cooker, his head still just slightly tilted, listening, motionless, “Yeah man, we each carry our own, aeh.”

“Yeah,” the Carpenter pushes his meal to one side, “but even then… even when all the spaces are filled with people, there has to be spaces inside the people map that just can’t be known by us aeh, just these wee tucked away corners that hide the knowings none of us can ever really grasp, maybe because they’re outside our imagination, or because we just don’t have words to explain what they are, and there’s… there’s… things that live in there and live their own lives outside our reckoning…

“Like, maybe they know that there’s a spot there that’s good to sun yourself in the morning because cats can’t reach you, or maybe that there’s a tiny gap in the walls that you can run along to get from your sleeping place to your feeding place, and you live in those spaces for your entire short life.

“So there’s this universe imagined by people, and we use it as our knowing, but there’s other knowings aeh, like, Sparrow knowing, or Mouse knowing, and they’re alien, and strange, and useless to others but kind of make up the foundation of everything people know because Mouse knowing clears our streets of rubbish, or turns what we know as dead spaces into living ones.

“But all this knowing is based on the things we have aeh. Like, we can’t imagine new things out of thin air, because we need to take our knowing from the things around us, and they root us to the spaces around us. It’s this long, slow cycle of knowing from the times we’re wee kids until we’re old geezers, all the time filling up our imagination with the shape of the city and the people, until we pass and take all that knowing with us…” He pauses again, and an uncomfortable silence follows till the jockey steps into it.

“You spending a lot of time up in that workshop all on your own e hoa?” He smiles, “Because it’s sounding a lot like it.”

The carpenter laughs a little, “Maybe… but it’s still true bro. There’s layers on layers that we aren’t seeing, and I feel like I just scratched the surface of something bigger, because sometimes… sometimes even when you get that there’s a city with in a city, there comes the edge of a knowing that you feel will drag you in, and totally change the map, like there’s a door no one has ever opened, and inside it there’s a new knowing that might end up out in the world for a first time, and if anyone is taken inside then all the knowing around it will shift outwards and sideways, and that new space is now real for the first time, and we can’t control how it moves or affects everything else…”

The carpenter trails off, and they both sit in silence for a short time, the hubbub of the city settling around them, an ever-present soundtrack to the lives of countless individuals hustling too and fro, churning the air of the streets and houses, a chaotic music with a rhythm too complex for human ears.

“You gunna let that dish get cold e hoa?” remarks the jockey, “I worked hard on that.”

“Best not,” smiles the carpenter, “dunno who else knows how to make noodles this good.”

Seven

It’s a small splash of colour hiding underneath the eave of a window in the poorest part of the city. Just a few words stencilled red on a clear patch in the neighbourhood’s grime, a vivid intrusion into the otherwise dull and monotonous apathy of an alley running the boundary of a housing unit, itself reaching up and into a last remaining clear space, grasping for fresh air and sunlight. The building reminds him of his own, a build by module stack of walls that make a furnace in the summer, and a refrigerator in the winter, largely intended as a gate to the keep the poor off the streets and away lest footpaths of respectable places become beggaries.

It’s been… a year(?) since the day he sat in the sun and read the small book, his obsession growing and forcing him onto the streets when he can spare time to watch, and listen, and wander further afield that his usual routine of home, workshop, people. He looks in secluded corners and over the walls of closed gardens. He sits and watches parks and passers-by, his curiosity peaked by the unusual and the banal alike, falling into a rhythm of observation and notation. But always he searches for that one small truth he feels hides from him and other people, the hidden city within the city, the dominion of the animals and birds, the insects and creepies that lie tucked beneath the veneer of human spaces, a universe of fellow travellers without voice or marker in the world of people.

In looking for that secret that he finds the splash. He’s pushed back some cardboard rubbish stacked haphazardly near the wall, assuming there will be a home for a rodent or small cat, some refuge he’ll catalogue in his mad census of the city’s underworld, perhaps a nest partially built, or a horde of small objects taken from the world above. At first he ignores it, assuming it’s a blob of paint spilled from discarded rubbish, or perhaps an older layer again exposed to the light by the actions of weather or a passer-by. But when his search for life is exhausted he rocks back on his heels and glances at the colour. It’s a simple thing, nothing more than three words impressed on badly-laid concrete, a small command or code laid out by an intention and provenance unknown.

It registers slowly, the colour forming into shapes that take their time making their way into words he understands, but which were perhaps destined to trigger that age-old and familiar unease. He looks away, pushes the hair out of his eyes, and looks again. Three such simple words… why does he feel the hairs on his neck rise, a tingle in his viscera?

He stands and backs away from the wall into the alley, taking his time to look around the walls, the way, the windows above, questioning whether this is a trick or trap. Despite cautiously looking around the lower reaches of the buildings lining the alley it’s the only graffiti of its kind, so he returns, and crouches again, this time checking the paint is dry, asking himself how long it might have been there, before muttering the three words to himself.

“Awake the Sleeper.”

The Insurgency

It’s a ramshackle dive of a place. The tables are worn and greasy from an age of slouching poets and patronising preachers, a patina of memory glazed fingernail deep across tight grain. The walls are patterned bright with bills, posters, photographs of old soaks, the come-hither garments of working girls all hiding from daylight and real time. A bar runs the length of one wall, a heavy macrocarpa trunk that must have fallen into place, the pub built around its ground and levelled surface, a time capsule turned away from the world of nature and now the ancient guardian of a menagerie of liars and fools. Bottles and glassware glitter in the small light behind the bar itself, a false constellation of consolation and respite.

He’s nursing a small beer, listening across a corner table to an old school friend, a fellow traveller from the days his generation were the darting urchins of the stifling, darkened lower floors of the urban surrounds. His friend is one of those lanky, far-seeing, absent types, the one who always saw that little further into the distance while his mates only saw the eyes of others looking back at them. He’d be called Lofty, or be accused of ‘having his head in the clouds’ while dreaming of places and things outside the hard boundary of the city, all the while seeing in a way that marked him out as a high-functioning, slightly manic weirdo in a community otherwise committed to conformity.

“Nah, thing is man, you’re looking at it like a person. You look out over there and you see the function of the thing you’re looking at. That is a building for work. That is a building for living in. That is a place for selling things. Each of those things is invisible to an animal, aeh? It’s just a big hard surface to sit on, or a place where food is laid out on the regular.” He pauses to take a long drag on his rollie, before shouting at the barista, “Derek! Two more?” and indicating the table.

“So imagine a town or city from their eyes, aeh? It’s just a wide space marked out with piles of rocks or piles of dead trees, infested with large, angry, flightless critters. Mebbe there’s greenery, and food in there, but there’s hardly any proper predators, hardly any large, sheltered spaces to roost, so the flocks scatter aeh and forage where once upon a time they might have, might have all landed in a big grassland or summin aeh and all picked over the place. Out there there’s safety in numbers, aeh, if a hawk or cat or summin kills one it’s no big, the flock just carries on, but here, in this crazy eruption in the landscape made by humans, they spread out into the gaps we’ve created, each wee bird finding its own food and hiding places.

“That’s the thing aeh, you just don’t know how many of them there really are, ‘cause they’re all tucked away in the wee corners of the urban jungle, like they’re hiding their numbers, but they have to be doing OK right? Because they’re always around.” He emphasises, leaning forward to avoid the bartender when threatens to interrupt the monologue by dropping off their drinks, “The tricksy wee buggers kind of spread their numbers out… like… like… an insurgency of sparrows…”

The Carpenter chuckles, “An insurgency of Sparrows. That’s pretty funny bro.”

“True though aeh… mebbe your grandad’s Quarrel just changed their tactics to better survive the increasing numbers of us, aeh? Well…, mebbe.”

The Carpenter looks back across the table, “It’s adaptation, aeh. The world changed around them, so they changed their ways to fit into it.”

Lofty nods, “Yeah bro, they fit into this new weird landscape we pushed up and out into theirs.”

“But, what if they can’t adapt man? What if this space was no good for all those critters?”

“Then they die man. And that kicks off something else… like… like… too many bugs in the city, or more rats eating food scraps, or, or, summin…”

The Carpenter finishes his first drink and mutters, “A long slow cycle of peace and prosperity…”

“Aeh?” asks Lofty.

“Nothing bro, just something I read.” He replies, smiling softly to himself.

Five

It’s a small room with a single window through which sunlight falls for a time in the morning. He likes to sit in the window seat and look out across the short distance between his building, the roof-tops just slightly below, and the gap through the buildings beyond that allow him his moments of sun. The book sits to one side between his now-empty bowl of cereal and a half-finished tea.

His room is much as you’d expect for a young man of few means. He sleeps in a never-made cot, and eats cold food due to a lack of a kitchen, his meals usually cobbled from small items garnered from local stores and padded with what forage he can find in a part-wild city. It’s a modest existence he enjoys, and it provides a type of freedom for him to indulge simple vices and a penchant for laziness. Unfettered by fashion or house pride, the room is little more than a box in which to keep his stuff, a modest treasure chest of items gathered and protected in his short journey to manhood. He keeps found art, old and damaged books, notepads and worn paper bearing scribbling or doodles. There’s little to suggest a man with a plan or intent, just a jumble of objects the meaning of each of which is never immediately obvious, a haphazard catalogue of insignificant monuments known only to the moment and the man. Like all hallmarks of poverty, each thing is an imperfect note played to a melody of years, a marking of time and unwillingness to surrender objects lest they provide respite in some fanciful future moment.

He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, glances at the book. He knows it’s a children’s story, a cautionary tale of the fickle nature of kings and gods, but it triggered a long-forgotten unease. “Where are the sparrows?” he asks himself.

He remembers being a child and seeing the flocks flying from the fields to the low, forested hills outside the city. They would mass in the twilight, a rush of chirrups and fluttering wings, swooping low over the buildings and folk, before settling in a garrulous chatter in the distant trees. He’d seen them with his grandfather, the old man’s arthritic fingers pointing out the quarrel coming up across the city before it gathered up and dropped into the forest. He remembered feeling that every bird in the trees was shouting at once, marking time and space, or sharing news of their day in the sun, friends and family alike jostling for attention before falling asleep with the loss of the light.

But he can’t remember seeing such a quarrel for many years. Sparrows are there, flitting between the cracks in the flat, hard, sun-baked pan of the city, but the joyous flocks of his childhood are gone, individual birds now eking their own existence from the tailings of humanity, like the broken remnants of a civilisation that tumbled beneath the eroding waters of an onrushing flood.

“Are they lonely…” he murmurs, and shifts in his seat again. As the sun slips behind the buildings across the roof he stands, dresses, and leaves his small room, his brow furrowed.

Time alone with a good book

At the edge of the world was a small nation, ruled by sleeping King whose eyes would only fall upon the moon.

The nation lived in peace among the foothills of a range where they were sustained by the waters of a river the child of the mountains, and were fed by river and the prairie upon which the river flowed until reaching a stranger’s ocean, many leagues away.

In the winter the birds of the mountains would flock to the low valleys and the plains, cleaning the countryside of the vermin and the biting fly. In summer they would fly to the heights, and fill the greater valleys with song, bringing with them the seeds of trees and their tales of the strange people who lived far below.

In the summer the great fish would wallow in the slow rolling of the river, churning water among the shallow weeds and eating the larvae of mosquito and dragonfly alike. In winter they dove deep, and murmured to one of another of the light that will come again as the rains swept clear the shallow water, cleaning the banks, the bounty of the mountains laying behind on the flats.

It was a slow turning the sky under the under the moon, and the King was happy in his slumber. His people took their livestock to the prairie in the autumns, and grazed them among the wild animals, and watered them from the great river’s tributaries in the turbulent winters. When the spring came the men walked their livestock up into the foothills and grazed them among the lesser, cool valleys of summer, and the women planted cereals and grains on the fertile banks of the river. It was a long cycle of peace and prosperity.

In time the people multiplied, and their herds and crops spread slowly further into the wilds. “We must feed our children” they said, and their animals moved into the edge of the forests that blanketed the mountains. Before long they came to the King while he was awake and asked him, “Dearest King, we have taken our livestock to the foothills, but there is too little fodder, and they eat the small trees, so now when the winter rains come, the waters are unfettered, and they rush from the hills and flood the plains”

“Then you will halve the herds,” he replied, “and half will graze the wild plains in the summer.”

So the people left their King to sleep, and took their herds to the plains. But in the summer the herds were distant from the ravenous birds and cool of the mountains, and their animals caused the biting fly of the prairies to spawn, and the people suffered.

Again the people returned to the King and told him of the plague of flies, and of the discomfort of the prairies. “Dearest King,” they complained, “we have grazed the prairies in the Sun, but the summers are too warm, and our children have no shelter from the heat of the day, nor from the cool of the night.”

“Then you will quarter the herd,” he replied, “and quarter will graze the streams.”

So the people left their King to sleep, and took their animals among the streams and tributaries of the great river. But the herds climbed into and out of the waters to cool themselves, and the mud of their stomping, and the eating of the water plants pushed filth into the tributaries, and flushed the immature fish out into the great river.

Again the people returned to the King, and told him of the muddying of the waters, and the decline of the fish of the great river. “Dearest King,” they complained, “we have grazed the tributaries, but the animals pollute the waters, and the small fish flee, and the big fish of the rivers eat their own, and the fishermen are bereft.”

“Then the herd will diminish,” replied the King, “and the fishes of the great river will recover, and they will feed people.”

So the people left the King to sleep, and waited to feed their children the fish of the great river. But the fish of the river fled ever-deeper into the darkness, and in their absence the weeds of the water grew too great, and began to clog and poison the still waters, and the people grew thirsty. At night the mosquitos would descend in great swarms, and the people suffered.

Again the people complained to the King, “The great fish of the river hide, and the waters of the slow and lazy river have become still and fetid, and the mosquito bring sickness and sleeplessness to the villagers, and our children hunger in the day, and weep in the night.”

“Then the fishing will return to the river husbands,” replied the King, “and the people will eat from the granaries”.

So the people left the King to sleep, and in the spring they seeded the plains and made to harvest and fill the granaries. But the birds of the mountains neglected the forests, and came to the plains and ate the easy food of the fields, and were killed by the people both for eating and to protect the grains. In the autumns the small, hard, fruits of the forests fell to the ground and were not spread up and down the great valleys on the wings of the forest folk, and the edges of the great forests declined. In winter, the rains came and without the binding roots of the trees the waters rushed from the hills and again flooded the plains.

Again the people complained to the King, “Sire, the people have grown, but at every turn we cannot fill the markets without falling afoul of the anger of the Mountain, or the Plains, or the River. We have no means to feed our children, and the people jostle and argue in crowds in the villages.”

The King looked for a long time upon the faces of his people, before replying with great sadness, “Then there will be famine.” and turned to again the moon.

Three

The podcast plays quietly in the background as he works, the dulcet, carefully-spoken voice of the narrator beginning to wind down the episode with a familiar refrain, “As you listen, imagine if you will what it would feel like to live in the rich heart of the world, knowing that the final days of empire stretched out before you. Imagine what it was to live in the end of days…” His chisel traces the curve and warp of the wood as he listens, slow incisions cutting sideways along the timeline of the grain, spent weeks and months of slow growth falling to the floor and folding into a messy, desiccating tumult of yesteryears. A grunt of satisfaction at his progress, he shelves his tools and walks to the window of his small workshop, looking through the glass at the small space beyond, the tops of a street bustle showing over his fence.

With the speakers fallen silent, the murmur of the city creeps, the sounds of hawkers and traffic, machines and weather competing to crawl up, over, and into his small sanctuary. He walks out through the yard, pausing briefly to see watch the blue sky above, before turning and locking the door. He unlatches the gate to the yard and he is in the world again. The smell of food carts and sweat, gas burners and rubbish piled in corners, dogs crawling between parked cars and cats prowling for prey. He loves the city for its endless variety, the small dramas of the daily lives of others acted out in public; customers haggling shopkeepers, lovers canoodling at the edge of crowds, parents bustling children in the small space between roads and commerce.

The city is small, but his people live at the edges of worlds, a place where strangers mingle among the native-born. They stop before passing through to the cities of real commerce, and leave behind the spice and aroma of far-flung towns or jungles. Prophets and poets walk the streets bearing strange philosophies, bards who whisper of the mysteries of long-dead kings, regaling his people with tales of creeping death and vines that grow only in the night, still and potent in the day, their tendrils awaiting the too-restful traveller. The death, they say, comes. With the impatience and vigour of the young man he pines for these places. “Death”, he thinks, “has been vanquished”.

He pauses from walking occasionally to listen to song or sales, an endless rolling maul of consumption and vice, money being tapped off cards or out of pockets, pleasures small and large rolled into the markets from the fringes of the world. He’s known but not popular, nodding to acquaintances, or waving to shop-keepers, a cliched montage of the home-town boy with a coin flicked to the congenial beggar and the jostled hair of the street urchin.

A whistle breaks his stride, and he turns towards the smile of a cart jockey, a long-known friend from his own days of sweat and adrenaline, his shoulders bent to the wheel of a city’s insatiable appetite. He waves back a smile and steers through traffic to take a low plastic seat among the dust and detritus.

“I knew you couldn’t resist, e hoa”

He barks a laugh, “You read it right, guess we’ll be looking at the usual”

“The yoozh it is,” replies the jockey, mixing oil and spice in the pan, “you off home?”

“Pretty much done, hoping to get this job sanded down and away soon enough.”

The carpenter glances over at the only other patron of the cart, an older guy, thin, a grey manicured beard, the look of a teacher or talker, himself raising his hand to drink the last of the broth, his blue eyes showing over the edge of the bowl.

“Mate.” He lilts, “howzat?”

“Grand. Just grand,” replies the gent, “always try to drop in on our man here. Best noodle this side of town.”

He smiles generously at the cart jockey, flashing briefly that blue-eyed twinkle the hallmark of a skilled orator.

“But that’s me,” he says, leaving the bowl on the small table beside the cart and rising from his seat before turning to wandering off on shaky pins, “I think you got this from here.” He says as he disappears into the pedestrians.

“He come in all that often?” asks the carpenter as the jockey passes him a steaming bowl of ramen, “Seems like a character.”

The jockey chuckles, “Bro, I have never, ever, seen that MF before in my life.”

The carpenter snort-laughs in return, looks sideways to the where the gent sat, and sees a slim volume, a book of some description, tanned with age and wear, left to sit next to the empty bowl like an unnecessary full stop.