When she turns away, a bindle lies on her bed of stone and straw. A plain handkerchief knotted around a long, burled black branch. She looses the cloth. Inside she finds a wine bottle, a pair of scissors, a stone figure of a straight-backed child in a chair, a brass key, a cracked, worn belt with two holes torn through, and a hundred shattered shards of colored glass. Pietta picks up one of the blades of glass and holds it to her breast until it slices through her skin. The glass is violet. The blood never comes.
ON AN ENDLESS plain where nothing grows lie a mountain as crowded as a city and a city as vast as a mountain. They face one another like bride and bridegroom. The city was enclosed at the commencement of linear time, a great ancient abbey bristling with domes, towers, spires, and stoas, chiseled out of rock the color of wine spilled on the surface of Mars, doorless, but not windowless, never windowless, candlelight twinkling from millions upon millions of arched and tapered clefts in the stone. From every one of these, you can see the mountain clearly, the people moving upon it, their lamps swinging back and forth, their hurryings and their stillnesses. The whispered talk of the people on the mountain can always be heard in the cloisters of the city, as though there is not a mile of churning black mud between the woman emptying her rain barrel after a storm and the ragged man murmuring on the windy crags. A road connects the mountain and the city, lit by blue gas lamps, cobbled by giants. No one has ever seen a person walk that road, though they must, or else what could be its purpose?
The clouded, pregnant sky swallows the peak of the mountain but declines the heights of the city. When there are stars, they are not our stars. They are not even white, but red as watch-fires.
In the city, which is called Nowhere, a man with the head of a heron sat comfortably in the topmost room of the policemen’s tower, working on his novel.
It was slow going.
He supposed he had everything he needed—a hurricane lamp full of oil, a stone cup full of dry red wine, a belly full of hot buttered toast, a typewriter confiscated from a poor soul he’d caught sledgehammering Fuck This Place onto the north stairwell of the Callabrius Quarter, a ream of fresh, bright paper filched from the records office. It was a quiet night in Nowhere. The criminal element, such as it was, seemed content to sleep the cold stars away until morning, leaving Detective Belacqua in peace.
He tried typing: It was a quiet night in Nowhere, then, disgusted with himself, abandoned his desk with a flamboyant despair no one could see to appreciate, and stared gloomily out the long, slender stone window onto the mud plain far below. A moonless spring blackness slept on the fields outside the walled city. It was always spring in Nowhere. But there were no cherry blossoms, no daffodils or new hens, only the cold dark mud of snow just melted, the trees stripped naked, bare arms flung up pleading for the sun, the smell of green but not the green itself. Every day was the day before the first crocus breaks the skull of earth, the held breath before beginning can begin. Always March, never May.
Detective Belacqua had several strikes against him as a budding author. For one thing, he had very little conception of time, an essential element in organizing narrative. He was, after all, mostly infinite. He barely remembered his childhood, if he could be said to have had one at all, but he remembered the incandescent naphtha-splatter of the birth of the universe pretty well. What order things happened in and why wasn’t his business. He didn’t pry. And this was another problem, for Detective Belacqua had not, in all his long tenure in the walled city, felt the urge to question any aspect of his existence. Such restlessness was not marked out on the map of a strigil’s heart the way it was scribbled on every inch of the maps of men. Belacqua enjoyed his slow progress through each day and night. He enjoyed hot buttered toast and dry red wine. He enjoyed his job, felt himself to be necessary in a way as profound as food to a body. Someone had to keep order in this orderless place. Someone had to give Nowhere its shape and its self. His world was a simple equation: if crime, then punishment. It didn’t matter at all why or how a criminal did his work, only that he had done it. And because he never bothered with the rest, Detective Belacqua was a hopeless novelist, for he had no clear idea of what drove anyone to do much of anything except be a policeman and bear lightly the granite weight of an unmovable cosmos. The actions of others were baffling and mostly unpleasant. He had never moved in the moral coil of clanging and conflicting wills. All he had ever known was Nowhere, and by the time Nowhere happened to a person, they had already made all the choices that mattered.
Yet Detective Belacqua longed to write with every part of his unmeasurable psyche. He had been a happy man before he discovered books. Very occasionally, people brought them to Nowhere in their sad little bindles. The first time Belacqua saw one, during a quickly opened, quickly shut case of petty theft in the Castitas District, he had confiscated it and crouched for hours in a vestibule, transfixed, as he read the crumbling paperback, the very hows and whys Belacqua had never understood. But it was not enough to read. Belacqua wanted more. There were no strigils in any of the books men brought to Nowhere. No one like him. The men had men-heads and men-desires and the women had women-heads and women-ambitions and nowhere could his heron-soul find a sympathetic mirror. And so he tried and tried and at best he plonked out It was a quiet night in Nowhere on the back of a blank incident report. He felt deeply ashamed of his desires and told no one. None of his comrades could hope to understand.
But it was, indeed, a quiet night in Nowhere. But a night was not a book.
“Make something happen, you blistered fool,” Detective Belacqua grumbled to himself.
A knock comes upon the door.
Rubbish.
Detective Belacqua pushed back from his desk, his belly perhaps slightly less righteously muscled than it had been when the primordium was new. He wrapped a long scarf the color of cigarette ash around his feathered throat, snatched his black duster from the hook near the door, and abandoned his post—only for a moment—in search of something more fortifying than buttered toast to fuel his furtive ambitions.
He had hardly left the tower when the alarm lamps began to burn.
SIXTY-SIX DAYS LATER, Pietta steps out of her room for the first time. No one has come for her. She has heard no footsteps in the long hall beyond her door. But a kind of rootless fear like thin pale mold forked slowly through her limbs and she could not bring herself to move.
She measures out the time in bears and glass. Each morning, Pietta places a shard of colored glass on her windowsill. They split the candlelight into harlequin grapeshot, firing volleys of scarlet, cobalt, emerald toward the mountain outside. She has developed a kind of semaphore with the smoke-eaters on those icy slopes; at least, when she moves her arms, they move theirs. But perhaps Pietta is the only one who imagines an alphabet.