Like broken slate
We take our hatred
And pile it high
Rolling with the hills
A ragged line to map
Our rise and fall
And I saw suffused
With the dawn
Crows aligned in rows
Along the crooked wall
Come to feed
Bones lie scattered
At the stone’s foot
The heaped ruin
Of past assaults
The crows face each way
To eye the pickings
On both sides
For all its weakness
The world cannot break
What we make
Of our hatred
I watched the workers
Carry each grey rock
They laboured
Blind and stepped
Unerringly modest paths
Piece by sheared piece
They built a slaughter
Of innocent others
While muttering as they might
Of waves of weather
And goodly deeds
Pray you never hear an imprecise breath
Caught in its rough web
Every god turns away at the end
And not a whisper sounds
Do not waste a lifetime awaiting death
Caught in its rough web
It hovers in the next moment you must attend
As your last whisper sounds
Pray you never hear an imprecise breath
The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins in love and ends with grief.
Time unravels now. Event clashes upon event. So much to recount, pray this sad-eyed round man does not falter, does not grow too breathless. History has its moments. To dwell within one is to understand nothing. We are rocked in the tumult, and the awareness of one’s own ignorance is a smothering cloak that proves poor armour. You will flinch with the wounds. We shall all flinch.
As might a crow or an owl, or indeed a winged eel, hover now a moment above this fair city, its smoke haze, the scurrying figures in the streets and lanes, the im shy;penetrable dark cracks of narrow alleyways. Thieves’ Road spreads a tangled web between buildings. Animals bawl and wives berate husbands and husbands bellow back, night buckets gush from windows down into the guttered alleys and — in some poorer areas of the Gadrobi District — into streets where pedestrians duck and dodge in the morning ritual of their treacherous journeys to work, or home. Clouds of flies are stirred awake with the dawn’s light. Pigeons revive their hopeless struggle to walk straight lines. Rats creep back into their closed-in refuges after yet another night of seeing far too much. The night’s damp smells are burned off and new stinks arise in pungent vapours.
And on the road, where it passes through the leper colony west of the city, a weary ox and a tired old man escort a burdened cart on which lies a canvas-wrapped figure, worn riding boots visible.
Ahead awaits Two-Ox Gate.
Hover no longer. Plummet both wings and spirit down to the buzzing flies, the animal heat sweet and acrid, the musty closeness of the stained burlap. The old man pausing to wipe sweat from his lined brow with its array of warts and moles, and his knees ache and there is dull pain in his chest.
Of late, he has been carting corpses round day and night, or so it seems. Each one made him feel older, and the glances he has been casting at the ox are tainted with an irrational dislike, wavering in its intensity, as if the beast was to blame for. . for something, though he knows not what.
The two guards at the gate were leaning against a wall, staying cool in the shade that would dwindle as the day rolled on overhead. Upon seeing the jutting boots one of the men stepped forward. ‘Hold, there. You’ll find plenty of cemeteries and pits outside the walls — we don’t need more-’
‘A citizen of the city,’ said the old man. ‘Killt in a duel. By Councillor Vidikas, who said to send him back to his friends — the dead man’s friends, I mean.’
‘Oh, right. On your way, then.’
