‘But you have noticed those barrels there. Have such casks come as far north as Ellamon? They contain the southern beer that so puzzled you a moment back, though in Kolhari it has become the passion of nearly every free and honest laborer. The thirsts it satisfies, you might well mark, not only mirror but mock those spiritual thirsts we’ve been talking of. Certainly the children lugging up their double-handled beer pots, ready to carry them here and there for a working aunt, or father, or uncle, or the houseboys and market maids there with their waxed leather bags, the insides still moist with yesterday’s draught, attest to the materiality of such thirsts, however much our poets try to spiritualize them. Note that young woman, with her pitcher, hesitating behind the crowd lined up at the syphon.
‘I shall talk more of her in a moment.
‘But have you marked the smaller barrels further down, attended by that wizened little woman with country labor stamped all over the flesh of her hands and in the muscles that band her wrinkled cheeks? Notice how she holds her bristly chin high, which means her neck once wore an iron collar — wore it many years. The casks she oversees contain a delicate cider from the family estate, high in the northern hills, of the late Baron Inige. Its taste pleased his family and his family’s guests for generations; and in his own lifetime, thanks to his interest in horticulture, that taste reached a piquancy unsurpassed in the nation — at least that’s the claim of those who can afford to pursue such investigations. One or two of our more prosperous waterfront taverns managed to import it only a handful of years ago, making the journey up to the hills and bringing it back in their own carts. In the last year, the estate itself, fallen on hard times since the baron’s death, has let that freed retainer there bring in a few barrels from time to time to sell in the market here.
‘But I was speaking of the young woman who hesitates with her pitcher between the two. For, though I have never been inside her home, simply from passing her in the market, seeing her on the street with her mother, watching her run across Black Avenue to greet her father, I have learned a great deal about her — and her situation. Her father is a workman, who loves his beer with the best, but who, some years back, had the notion and the money to hire several of his fellows, specializing in the laying of underground clay pipes; his skill and the skill of the artisans he employs has improved his condition in every way. The girl’s mother was once a washer woman who laundered fine fabrics for the families of Sallese; but when she and her husband built their new home in the prospering tradespeople’s district on the west side of the city, a sense of decorum made her sacrifice her laundering to the very real duties of her newer, larger home. The girl’s brother, as a boy, was apprenticed to a successful pot spinner down in Potter’s Lane to replace an erring youth who disappeared from the same position into the barbaric south with money and franchise orders some years back. The girl is terribly proud of her younger brother, for you know that the very gods of our country are represented as patient, meticulous craftsfolk, who labor at the construction of the world and who may never be named till it is completed.
‘The girl plays beautifully on several of the stringed instruments they carve so well in the east. When she was a baby, a wise woman, begging from door to door in the city, saw the child, cast bones and wooden coins on the pavement, and read, in the array, of a great and profitable musical talent asleep in the infant’s fingers. The parents accordingly sat the child to study with one of the eastern music masters who had recently located here, as soon as she was old enough. The prophecy seems to be fulfilling itself, and her talent has awakened. Already she has composed several sacred litanies, and several times, now, her mother, presuming upon that old acquaintance with the mistresses for whom she once did washing, has taken the girl to wealthy homes in the suburbs to play. Several times, now, the girl has been requested to entertain at gatherings of the lords in Neveryóna, for which she and her family have been handsomely compensated. Only last week, in fact, she was playing some of her compositions for the discerning and glamorous lunching about a flowered and bestatued pool, when an elderly baronine, moved deeply by the young woman’s song, suggested, so rumor has it, that if the artist would compose something in praise of the Child Empress, an audience might be arranged at the High Court itself. Yes, that is the very girl we are observing now, her pitcher on her thumb, hesitating between sophisticated cider and common beer.
‘Certainly, by now, you have your own notions about which direction she will finally turn. Will contagion or sympathy govern her choice? How many of the factors I have outlined will go into the final overbalancing we call decision? All, I suspect — if only because she is a particularly sensitive person. (Some say her voice and fingers were fashioned by our gods for some celestial craft-fair competition!) In her own songs she has praised both the delicacy of the one drink and the heartiness of the other.
‘Come, let’s leave her to choose, appreciative of the complexities that play now so silently on her spirit. Only be certain that whichever way she turns, it will be to assuage thirsts far more intricate than those the tongue alone can know. Now take your place in line with me, to drink the water from this gushing, public stone. The underground steam that feeds the fountain here, before brick and pavement encircled it, closed over its tributary, and civilized it, is what first made this a trading spot back when all around was merely a brambly field, with the wide, rocky brook of the Khora running by it to the sea. But remember, as you touch your lips to the water breaking and flashing on your palms, your own movements here will sign, as much as anyone else’s in the market — to the proper reader — aspirations, ideals, and nostalgias that pervade an empire.
‘Have you drunk your fill?
‘Good.
‘Let’s wander on.
‘Do you see those yellow and blue birds twittering in their reed cages — loosely woven baskets is what they really are. The mottled objects piled on the counter across from them are the eggs of the same caged creatures, collected in the wild and pickled in vinegar till their shells soften and their insides congeal as though steeped in boiling water. Right above and to the left, on the shelves at the stall’s back, are still the same birds, this time carved in wood or molded of clay, but painted far more gaudily than the colors their live models ever wear, even when they flash in the sun-dapplings between frond and vine in the southern jungle. Note that short, grave man with the shaved head who stops to make a purchase, now at one counter, now at the next. The white collar-cover he wears hides the same iron I carry on my neck. Owned by a wealthy family visiting the city, he is making purchases his master and mistress decided on during a trip here yesterday afternoon. That someone could want all three — live bird, pickled egg, and carved bird — seems to sign a voraciousness in our attitude toward that odd construct of civilization, nature, a voraciousness abroad wherever the conceiving engine that builds villages, towns, and cities is at work, almost as if the central process of civilization itself were to take a “natural” object and possess its every aspect: the thing itself, its material productions, its very image.
‘Look down that aisle, and you will see a fragment of the same process without the mediation of middleman and purchase order.