The World is Flat
User
The following is an old little bit i wrote a long time ago. It illustrates how different my writing style becomes after my long editing process.
Short Story Draft
The Arts of Gardening and Napping
The rodent nibbling a crumb by the ditch raised its head, grey as the weathered stone building walls, with that concentrated look of fear in the pale amber eyes. A ways past the obsidian nose that snuffled futilely, through the blurry gloom, there was movement. As I was upwind, the rat registered me by the stoic clink of my boots against the disheveled cobbles of the street, and by the pull and release of my breath – I lingered, for a moment, on the familiar sense that I was an unwelcome stranger. I was walking alone amidst a city of boarded doors and windows, the fabrics and metals clothing me devoid of the predominant filth. Here only during the nights, when there was the curtain of blackness to hide what they did, that a few people – mainly the smugglers and barterers of illicit commodities – gathered, in the abandoned basements or in the alleys, in this poor borough.
The rat’s whiskers twitched; I saw the pink tail chase the furry body into a hole. And so I found myself very much alone, being the only animate thing besides the breeze against the garbage and doors on loose hinges, in a towering aisle of tutor structures – they were once handsome aloof buildings, now sagging, bellies bulging out over the sidewalk, rotten wood skeletons emitting the wet aroma of wilderness. A manor, at some time a residence of dignity, had a buckling slate roof and was recessed beyond unkempt verge, lanky bushes that threatened to grow through the cracks around the proud old oak door and invade the secluded furniture and the plates.
Cambridge was more quiet – desolate – now that the Inquisition’s entourage of wagons had come and gone, with their ungreased axles squealing, and the men in white robes yelling at the rag-bound vagabonds, and the litany of pitiful voices scraping at the air in search of gifts of bread and clothing. Retched beggars lost in the sea of the slums. It had been close to a year since the wagons came through, bound well beyond the city, beyond the bridge that crossed the Great River, bound for the western border where, I suppose, they were sent to join a war – and they had not come back. Their carelessly discarded debris remained: wood chips, splintered boxes leaning against lamp posts, broken bottles ground down to crystalline shards, cloth scraps drenched in months of grimy rain, and scattered about there were twigs and leaves. The silk cloak waving at my heels whisked these aside.
I let slip a tenuous exhale that carried away from me in the gently moving air. It was early summer and the sun was falling behind the forefront of an armada of wispy juggernauts, casting soft yellow light that seemed to tinge the world dull. Winter’s white blanket had been gone for months, leaving the ugliness all too bare, exposing the truth, some mistake in the design of things, some flaw, some blight – plain as a thunderhead. I noted the apartments, standing in various stages of shame, one leaning from a rupture in its foundation, another with a collapsed wall opening to a rotten interior. Though, as I walked, I found they were less in states of disrepair; some more livable, some of the buildings fully intact, and at last I saw distinct signs of life. Mot’s Bar, read the half-affixed placard over a brick tavern; there was a depression in the earth leading to the door, and a stain of dirt from the main road, suggesting good business. I caught a combined scent of ale and vegetable grease.
From this dreary western section of the city I walked clear to the southern, meandering along streets that it seemed by rights never should have been made, avenues so bleary and remote they were only a waste of good stone and shovels. Most of the dilapidation, common as it was, could be ignored. Once I saw a boy, pursued, laughing, by another; children locked in some forbidden game as their masters toiled in the workshops. They were skittish, I realized, fleeing from the sight of me, afraid of the man in armor. Most of the young ones here, as I was told, had been purchased from the farmers eking out their lives in the mountain terraces, in the rugged landscape where the weather frowned on its trespassers. They were servant boys who had ten years to work off the price of freedom.
There was, shimmering from the silver piece that bound my chest, a golden etching, the pompous Insignia of the Magistrate, my order: a lion rearing with a twisted branch clutched in its maw. It served well as a deterrent to the thieves and the thugs, those fools fingering their crude blackjacks and leering with their deathly black gazes. I had been tasked to locate an old hermit. His name as I had read it – a scribble on goat-skin parchment – was not of the same class used by commoners. Most had but a first name, with a family suffix. There could be found the sisters Bolent and Tient, for example. By comparison, three names was a mark of prestige. My quarry was John Lucifer McAlistair, in ages past a reputable sorcerer teaching at the Grand Academy, as I had been informed. He eased into retirement – reclusion more likely – the same year that the Magistrate issued a mandatory registration for all known magic-wielders. Supposedly I would find him living here in Cambridge, in the Central District, opposite a printing factory.
The map I used – stained with wine and ridden with crinkles – showed the city in a different condition, when different roads existed. I glanced up from the slip held in my hand to see the street come to an end at the black picket fence of the Central Cathedral, a sprawling stone monument with royal stained glass windows that beckoned the sunlight.
After time wasted roving in circles I came upon a curious sight, something to catch the eye amid the otherwise grey, uniform jungle; and I knew at once that I had found McAlistair’s home. My breathing stopped in admiration. A quaint split-rail of ax-wrought timbers ran the perimeter of a verdant lot, backed into clusters of mature bamboo. The insects and birds were chirruping quiescent melodies. A bamboo domicile with a roof of thatch rested in the center of a garden overflowing with a rainbow spree of flowers.
“Ah, Mr. McAlistair, there is some strength in you yet.”
~
A lanky old man with a flowing white beard lay prostrate and snoring on the hammock, its wound fibers creaking in rhythm to the side-to-side sway and matching the drag and rasp of its occupants breathing. The square space was small and rife with greenery, locked betwixt the buildings. In the city of Cambridge the weather was calmer, milder than in the surrounding hilly farmlands, here tamed by the foot of the lake that the harbor was built around, tamed by the clusters of high buildings taller than trees. All the hubbub and the bustle, the jeers and the calls of the merchants in the trade square, the cries of the kids as they were released from the Instructional Institute on Academy Boulevard, all of these reckless noises were faded to whispers softer than wind knocking bamboo leaves.
The elderly man in the hammock snorted and then blinked, crisp blue eyes peering out through a field of bushy white eyebrows. Those glassy orbs of his twinkled. While indeed he had been sleeping through the middle of the day, and while he was old, John McAlistair’s senses were keen as any others. There was a stranger approaching. The man had been traveling throughout the city since dawn, searching. Now, he had arrived. He was entering through the gate. McAlistair felt each footstep traipse tentatively over the dirt path, noted the change in the birdsong, the flutter of discontented wings, the altered scent of the air.
For twelve years his magic tricks and barriers had hidden him from the prying eyes of the Magistrate. He thought – an old man’s folly – that perhaps they would leave him in peace. But, alas, it seemed the time for reckoning had come. They would ask, no doubt, that he choose a side. That he register himself with their records. That his magical potential be tested, and if he proved of high caliber – as McAlister was sure he would – they would extract him from his garden, from his hammock even. They would want him. He could not give in to their demands. He would have to flee and disappear again, or stand up and fight.
