An extract from the anonymously-published travel memoir of the same name, concerning the White Havens in Syfria. Reprinted by kind permission of the University of Yelda.
Title page of The Second City; reproduced by permission
Today I rose early to bright sunshine and the gentle plash of the cormorants fishing in the canal. I took my breakfast on the terrace, whilst they lined the balustrade like glossy black gargoyles, drying their wings in the morning sun.
St Tamas’ Lock is pretty in the spring. The water is green and inviting, not yet rank from summer’s heat, and the flower-boxes at the windows of the houses across the water are a riot of blossom. The stucco is peeling and the paint on the shutters has faded but there is a comfortable, comforting ordinariness here that I do not see in the grand residences of the Kingswater with their stiff lines and upright columns that frown so sternly upon the waters below. The Lock is falling gently into decrepitude and that suits me well, for so am I.
After breakfast I hailed a waterman to take me across the Basin to the Arcade to collect my mask for Fool’s Night. The Basin is the mercantile heart of the Havens: four canals converge there, in the deepest channel of the Great River’s many mouths, on which the city is built. It is the furthest point upstream still navigable for deepwater hulls, and is fringed with wharfs and quays that serve the many commercial interests of the quarter. Lighters and skiffs criss-cross the bright water constantly, and from the larger craft, bare-backed stevedores whistle and call in the forest of masts like birds.
The White Havens lives out its life upon the water. If one so desires. it is possible to traverse the city in any direction, from the Governor’s mansion to the twisty backwaters of Haven-port, entirely without setting shoe to stone. By day, the floating markets of Spice Dock and Low St Caterin’s offer all manner of little wonders to delight the senses– orchids and bell-flowers, Sardauki hot peppers, carved puzzle boxes from Arkadie–but it is in the evening that the Empire’s “Second City” comes alive. Flares and torches line the canals, and the finest families take to their barges – gilded monstrosities by day, that after dark are transformed into exotic islands of music and dalliance, of fluting voices and fluttering fans.
I hear their laughter as they drift about from the theatres to the gaming clubs; it is quite the thing now for the young bucks to chase the dice in the back rooms of Haven-port, where they bray and belch and flaunt their velvet coats amongst the lighter-men and quayside porters and think themselves so very daring.
But even smaller canals like the Lock see their share of revelry. For Fool’s Night there will be fireworks and music; we will put away our humdrum lives and don our masks for the greatest revel of them all. Aging I may be, but for one night I will be young again, and dance with a stranger on a rooftop until the sun comes up, then kiss him goodbye without ever learning his name.
* * *
This piece was originally written for the Booksworn writers’ collective, for their “Inside the Story” series that featured insights into various fantasy novelists’ worlds in the style of “The History of the World in 100 Objects”. The object I picked to represent the world of my books was a city.
I originally set out to write the piece in the style of a Victorian travel memoir but couldn’t sustain the tone, so it ended up more of a love letter to the city from a lady “d’un certain âge” and I rather like it. As for the traveller herself . . . I can’t help but imagine the stories she could tell!
NB I apologise for the quality of the image. The original was created 12 years and 3 computers ago and this is all I could rescue from the Wayback Machine.
