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.