He entered the city amidst heavy traffic as the day was drawing to a close. The lowing oxen-trains of caravans had already pulled to the verge to pitch camp by this time of day; this crowd was all afoot, dressed in humble woolens, sweaty and stinking of soil. Locals coming in from the spread of fields that carpeted this broad river valley as far as the eye could see, pocked only intermittently by clusters of three-dimensional shapes with columns of smoke rising from them. He was amidst farmers, making their way home for their evening meal and a well-earned rest.
He didn’t stand out in this crowd, but nor did he blend in. His clothing was in earthen hues, sturdy fabrics showing wear and without any ornamentation on them. His boots were scuffed, sheets of cracked clay still flaking off as if he’d walked through shin-deep mud at some point since he put them on, long-enough ago for the muck to dry entirely. There were tatters at his cuffs, brambles tangled in the hem of his cloak.
But still, he wasn’t one of the people he was rubbing shoulders with. Their skin came in a range of hues and their hair, brown or black, was here coarse, there curled, elsewhere straight and fine as corn silk. Within this generous canon, he had his niche, being no darker than this man nor lighter than that. His hair an uninteresting combination of thick and straight and mink-pelt brown just like that of the woman walking a few paces ahead of him. His nose was a nose, his lips neither full nor thin, his eyes dark, but not startlingly so. It was hard to say what precisely set him apart from the pedestrians surrounding him.
Maybe the fact that he didn’t have his eyes on his feet, on the packed-soil street and the people close enough to jostle him: he kept them trained forward. Striving toward the walls and the gates and beyond. Like he had a destination and was trying to catch sight of it.
As if he, too, had noticed this about himself, he dropped his eyes as the shadow of the walls reached out to him. The crowds were thick, but not so thick he wasn’t frequently visible between the shoulders of his fellow pedestrians. There were guards on the gates, none of them standing martinet-stiff at their posts, but none of them staring at the horizon, either, eyes glazed. They were taking the time to look into the face of everyone who entered, but since they never stopped anyone, it wasn’t clear what they might have deemed untoward.
The walls themselves were tall, as walls ought to be, flat along their top instead of crenelled like a boxer’s teeth. They were thicker at the base than at the height, sporting a crown of iron spikes to stab the sky. Their outer face was covered in tiles, creamy brown like milk stirred into melting chocolate, cracked with age and missing in places. This lent the city an appearance of antiquity and hard use before ever you laid eyes on it.
The shadows were lengthening and growing sharper. The countryside had emptied out behind the home-bound crowds, a broad and silty river left to meander lazily south. Lights were going up indoors in those scattered settlements standing bravely proud of the city’s walls, and against the western horizon, snow-gowned mountain peaks reflected the sun’s last light dazzlingly.
The young man passed through the gates uncontested, earning no more than a cursory inspection from the woman standing on the right-hand side of the gates, closest to him. Finally, you could see more of this place than the gilded tops of spires, jagged minarets pointing at the purpling heavens accusingly. They were mostly brick—there seemed to be very little stone—but were no less beautiful for it. Their windows were tall and thin, ending in pointed arches, with colorful paint outlining them like eyes dressed up to go out for the night.
There were no setbacks, very little greenery, but the streets weren’t so narrow as to make the lofty frontages loom threateningly. People making their way home kept a watchful eye for other pedestrians, and anyone with a bag had a protective hand across its flap, but the ways weren’t so close that people had to dodge around each other. The only creatures populating the streets, other than humans and domesticated cats hunting or sunning, were ostriches. Many of them wore glorious beaded headdresses, panniers on their backs.
Once through the gates, the young man headed south. He moved with no evidence of haste but didn’t linger to admire the sights, passing unimpressed and undeterred through squares where fountains sprayed rainbow jets across the magenta, sunset heavens. Walking unheeding past monuments with handsome copper plating that seized the final glints of sun and sent them scattering. His face was blank, making it difficult to tell if he just didn’t care for artistry or if he wasn’t interested because this was all old news to him.
Some blocks south of the gate, he entered a market. More than half the stalls were already closed up, those shopkeepers who remained chatting with each other as they tidied away at a leisurely pace. Here, finally, something seemed to make him hesitate. One booth selling gewgaws caught his eye, and he slowed. He lingered to finger the trinkets, touching wooden carvings, fingers tracing across valuable amber figurines, while the merchant stood with her shoulder to him, staring straight ahead with a fixed expression on her face. Like she didn’t want to admit that she had noticed him.
He passed on without ever picking anything up or asking after prices. He’d changed course, though, and quit the stall-cluttered area via a road leading east instead of south. Whether this was always his intention was impossible to tell.
He kept on along his chosen path for a while, moving with the same evidence of purpose, the same lack of urgency. He paused only one more time, in order to inspect the bunches of dried herbs visible around the curtains of an apothecary that had already been closed up for the night. While he squinted at sickly-yellow verbena and faded oregano, a pair of guards went past. They weren’t wearing the same armor as the people at the gates: there were metal details on their lacquered breastplates, and the quilted coats underneath were red instead of turquoise. Their helms bore enameled crests instead of horsehair tails. Nothing in the young man’s demeanor conveyed wariness, but he waited until they had disappeared down a passing way to move on.
One more corner, and he seemed to have slowed down. His eyes darted before he sidestepped into a shadowy alleyway. His pace slowed, but he had to pick his way amidst drying puddles and scattered bits of trash, dumpsters filled to overflowing with the day’s rubbish. He might have slowed down because he wasn’t sure where he was going anymore, but then again, he might be taking his time because he didn’t want to step in anything. The buildings on either side were three stories, few windows facing each other across the alley’s narrow divide, those there were, curtain-covered for privacy. It was hard to see, in other words.
In the darkest and most secret recesses of this manmade canyon, he faltered to a halt. For the first time, a trace of uncertainty: he wasn’t quite sure where he was going. His eyes roved across the bricks on his right, searching for what wasn’t obvious. With a shake of the head, he cracked one knuckle—the thumb of his right hand—with a report as loud in the silence of this shrouded lane as a firecracker. His head cocked like he was listening for something,
Then he took two fast steps backward, where he turned to face the wall at his right hand. He raised both hands to the height of his shoulders, bending his fingers in a swift series of uncomfortable poses, each briefly frozen, as if he was playing allegro ma non troppo on an invisible instrument. As the song reached its crescendo, colorful images shimmered to life on the drab, pitted bricks before him, and he lowered his hands.
There was a hint of heat-haze around the effected bricks that made it hard to tell which was the illusion: the unremarkable wall or the vivid images superimposed on it. What you saw, what he played into being, was a square of squares, jewel-toned abstract pictograms in a grid three-by-three. Wavy lines on purple; a viciously-curving triangle like a claw, orange as an owl’s eyes. A red fan, bursting upward like a volcano.
The man with the tattered cloak was fumbling through his pockets, suddenly moving with haste. Whatever it was he’d done here, he didn’t have long to capitalize on it. What he finally pulled free, in a shower of lint and sunflower seeds, was a key. Kind of a key, or a key of some kind. Fine, a picture of one: the piece of paper was the size of his palm, crumpled and stained and soft as cloth. Flattened, it revealed a drawing in ink, a key nearly as big as the page containing it, long, conveying the weight of iron, with three thick teeth on one face and two on the opposite.
The key, he held up beside the wavering images on the wall, which were already draining of color. A few of them pulsed when the key drew close, and he moved it urgently from one to the next, unblinking in intensity. After the first once-over, he bounced between something puffy, amorphous, pale blue, resembling nothing so much as a blob of foam, and a white starburst like light catching off the sharpened edge of a razor’s blade. One, then the other, and he came back to the white flare as the images attenuated, pressing the paper key decisively to what had become again a façade of unornamented bricks.
With a dusty scrape, the wall spat something out. It was far too dark in the alley by then to make out what it was, but it hit the ground a second later with a metal tinkle. The man stooped, fingers seeking across the shadow-masked pavement. He stood, wadding the thing he’d retrieved up in the paper key and thrusting both into his pocket.
He quit the alley from its far end, and the city he emerged into was a different one than the city he’d quit twenty minutes earlier. Subtly but unmistakably. Artificial light was rising in the sun’s wake, casting new shadows at new angles and remaking what it touched. Everything was golden now, the blackness sharp-edged.
There wasn’t a greater or lesser number of people out on the streets than there had been, but their character had changed. Very few of them were alone anymore: they traveled in gaily-talking mobs, in pairs linked by hands, slowly with a child skipping after them. Voices were louder than they had been, more boisterous. The sounds of industry, ear-assaulting bangs and clangs, were gone, music rising in their wake. In lieu of shouting, laughter.
His progression through these busy streets changed, growing syncopated. He was still trying to maintain a brisk pace, and there weren’t necessarily so many more pedestrians around. None of them were paying more than half their mind to their feet, though, preoccupied with their friends and families. Laughing together as they traded tales or complaints now the day’s work had ended. He was forced to duck and dodge continuously as tipsy young people bumped into him, gamboling children tripping his feet while dogs stopped in front of him unexpectedly to urinate.
He didn’t seem to be completely sure where he was going anymore, either, or at least he wasn’t clear how to get there. His route zigged and zagged, and he kept tipping his chin up, craning his neck like he was sighting on something on the skyline. It was hard to tell what, since the buildings’ heights weren’t illuminated. Here within the city’s center, every horizon was halfway up the sky, overcrowded with lacy spires and domes light-spangled as torchlight and starlight catch upon panels of gilt or copper.
Whatever he was looking for, he knew its silhouette: he wasn’t lost, he never stopped. No nervous second-guessing of direction, no stops in the middle of intersections in order to spin circles like a broken compass-needle. One final corner, and he threw himself back, so startled to have arrived wherever he was going that he flung his hands out, almost striking someone walking next to him.
As he resumed his journey, he ducked his head as if a casual manner were a broad-brimmed hat he might use to hide his face. He had entered a square rivaled only by that of the market he passed through much earlier, but this space was different. Open, if not empty: there was nothing here but trees and statuary, but it was crowded by people, these more solemn than the evening’s crowds elsewhere.
Many of them had congregated in a line creeping along the southern face of the square toward the broad portico of the building at the east. Others climbed the flight of stairs to the monumental structure, as many exiting the doors and descending. This late in the day, it was a place where many still wished to be, and they had chosen to come here instead of making merry.
The building itself was tall, deep, broad, massive on every axis. It had been fashioned of stone, as few here were. The stone was soot-streaked white, pink around the lintels, luminous in the lantern-light that made this bustling square day-bright. Its spires were many and lofty, built of some material that refracts any illumination that touches on them so they seem to glitter like the stars coming out overhead. Its doors were continuously opening or closing, so that they’re never either/ or, and the sound from within was always in the process of swelling or fading. Chanting, you heard, somber and unsettling, broken intermittently by the joyful tinkling of a bell.
The man looked to be making for the structure, but he veered left as he drew close to the steps. With the suddenness of a threshold crossed, he slipped from the brilliant illumination of the court into the shadows of an alley, abyssal-dark in contrast. He didn’t go far, just far enough that no stray beam from the square might alight on him.
He had one hand against the wall of the colossal structure that remained so busy at this hour, as if he sought to orient himself. When the surface under his fingers changed, though, he stopped. From the soapy kiss of porous stone, finely buffed, to wood’s smooth skin, seamed by joints where planks have been neatly fitted. In the wall, a door.
There, he knocked.
It wasn’t timid or furtive. Nor was it disjointed, a puzzling rhythm announcing a coded identity. Just a plebian tap-tap-tap of the knuckles, as if he’d come to a neighbor’s house in search of an extra cup of flour. A pause, while he waited for someone to notice him, then he did it again: tap-tap-tap. Maybe a little more forcefully this time.
The door was solid, well-fitted; the slap of approaching feet wasn’t audible until the feet had almost arrived. A fleeting pause while someone fumbled with the lock, then the door swung open. Silhouetted against the relative brightness of a hallway lit by a single lamp was, well, a silhouette. A person in a robe or cassock, hair trimmed close about the skull. Based on their height and the breadth of their shoulders, it might have been a man or a woman.
The man who entered the town with the setting sun was already tugging his keys back out of his pocket. He handed both over, the sketch and its iron twin. The person in the doorway turned sideways as they took the keys from him in order to expose them to the light she had eclipsed, and you were able to see a woman in her middle years, stern of face and gray of hair. Sight of the keys shoved a grunt from her and she held up one digit, indicating that her guest should wait.
She shut the door, dropping the alley back into darkness that felt total. The door was opening again so swiftly, it was impossible the woman had gone anywhere. She was holding out one hand, and the man took what she was offering, lifting it close to his face so he could perceive it in the brief flash of light before the door swung closed with permanence.
Heaving a sigh, he clasped the object in both hands and pressed it against his chest. It snagged a stray flicker of light from the square as he tucked it safely away in an inner pocket of his cloak, a dragonfly the length of his small finger, done in silver and green enamel, jade its tail. Snugged the hood of his cloak up over his hair, he set off in search of an alley where he could curl up out of sight until the new day brought the gate’s opening.
THE END
Note from the author: Back in undergrad I purchased from an art fair a pottery tile. The artist had painted a selection of vegetables arranged in such a way as to resemble a female nude lying on her side, seen from the rear. Beneath this striking image, the words: Reclining Salad. As objets d’art went, I thought that was pretty nifty, and it turned out my parents were taken with it, too.
Ever since, they’ve been bringing back tiles from their travels to add to my collection. The tiles range from abstract images to human figures, all of them necessarily small. Evocative, for such modest works of art. In this series, I’ll be writing a short story for each, my very own miniature Pictures at an Exhibition.
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