Months pass. The seasons march on.
They hold the
elections in early summer, and by midsummer, the Diet has declared
the new Consul. By mid-autumn, with the trees shedding their leaves,
Adena has changed. Walls are adorned with murals and slogans.
There is a heavy
constabulary presence throughout the New Village. Someone beats a man
to death in broad daylight for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread.
Bystanders and lawmen alike do nothing.
And as wages stagnate,
crime rises.
News comes of a young
woman, stabbed in the neck for a pocketful of frintac. Not even
enough to pay for a week’s eating. They wash the blood from the
cobblestones and bury her, and it’s as though she never existed.
The Old City views
those who live in the New Village as an abstraction, not people who
have hopes. To the wealthy, they are but pairs of hands, ill-mannered
people who wouldn’t know what to do with wealth even if they had
it.
In this way, they can
tell themselves that they are justified in their perpetuation of this
system.
And now it is winter.
Cytalis Trelen can see
her breath on the frigid air, wrapped as best she can in a cheap coat
of coarse hair. But the cold finds places to reach in with its thin,
bony fingers, and with every gust of wind she feels another pang as
her skin braces against the cold. She has struggled to afford
firewood, let alone gas. Thus, she lives her life cocooned.
The twin crescent
moons hang together in the sky like two eyes closed in silent
mourning.
She passes through
Ubravit Square. It consists of a cobbled area, surrounded on all
sides by high brick buildings, roughly four stories each. In the
centre is a small fountain with a statue of Fel Grevast, the sixth
Consul of Adena. Beside him, on lower plinths, there stand Belrenna
and Sedolis, his wives, forever averting their gazes.
Looking to the north end of the square, there is
a mural painted on the bricks. It’s very striking, with the
dominant colours being vibrant reds and greens.
In the foreground, agricultural workers pick
graingrass barefoot in the paddies. They smile as they kneel, slicing
the stems with sickles, then thresh the stalks for the grains
contained within.
Standing above them is a tall, thin man,
blond-haired and blue-eyed, dressed in a red-and-green tunic. His arm
extends in a gesture of good will, the palm facing down, the fingers
extended. The Sun halos his head, and he smiles imperiously,
surveying the land.
Block letters at the bottom identify him:
RO DANEST
CONSUL OF ADENA
In her hand, she
clutches a letter. It came to her, unmarked, so much so that upon
receiving it she thought it must be an eviction notice. But it isn’t.
It’s a very short
letter.
Please come to the
tower.
One week to the day.
Come after dark.
Knock three times.
She knows, of course,
that Ro Danest has taken up a new residence in recent months – an
annex affixed to the Diet – but Consuls are by no means required to
surrender their other properties when elected.
This is, she presumes,
why he has called her to the tower, that tower where they first met,
almost a year ago. Much less opportunity for scandal. Word travels
fast in the Republic.
After months of no
communication, she had assumed he had simply forgotten about her.
She felt stupid,
laying awake in bed at night, trying to ignore the sounds of breaking
glass and shouting in the street. (She rarely felt safe going out
when it was dark now, which was most of the time in winter.)
How does she feel
about him? Really? She has tossed it around in her mind for months.
On the surface, yes, she hates him. She hates everything he stands
for. Tradition often depends on deprivation. The tide of history is
dammed by the corpses of the impoverished, and what you have left is
a reservoir of blood.
But still, she has
known him on such an intimate level – far more intimately than most
women he has ever met. He has made her come several times, and every
time she has enjoyed it. She has enjoyed playing Goddess for him,
holding him in her hand. It makes her feel so powerful, so beautiful,
so...so in control.
Yet, as she watches
life in the New Village get worse and worse, she feels that it is
herself that is being toyed with. That she is in his hand. She
wonders, what must it be like to gaze up at me, to feel so small and
powerless?
The thing is, she
couldn’t know. The entire experience is fundamentally different.
For Ro Danest, to be Changed is to be removed for a short time from a
position of power. For Cytalis Trelen, this is her reality. For her
to be small, to gaze up at the vastness of him, would feel no
different than it feels to gaze up at the Grand Diet from the dark
and cluttered streets of home.
Even at his smallest,
he is enormous. He casts shade over every aspect of her life. And she
hates him for it.
She sees the tower
come into view as she turns the corner. It is at the end of a long
boulevard of little houses, their fronts all decorated with polished
stones from the river. The river, she notes, that the people of the
Old City never deign to visit.
All around her, she sees wealth – gas lights on
full blast, statues of polished stone on balconies whose railings are
of wrought metal in ornate patterns. These people do not know what it
is to go without. She turns her gaze to the ground, as if she is
trying to avoid making eye contact with her social betters. She draws
the hood of her coat up over her head, and follows the road up the
rest of the way.
It’s a steep
incline, but one she is used to. She reaches the large metal gate
that encloses the tower’s courtyard. She pushes on it, and it does
not move.
For a moment, she
thinks he must have changed his mind, and she will have to make the
long, embarrassed journey home. But then she sees the bolt, and
remembers that last time, there was a guard here to open the gate for
her. The courtyard is empty but for moonlight. A wind blows, rustling
the leaves of a decorative tree.
Shaking her head at
her own stupidity, she unbolts the gate and opens it with a slight
kreeeek. She passes through it, closing it behind her, and
steps across the gravel of river stones broken up by well-manicured
flowerbeds and shrubbery.
She stops for a moment
to look up at the tower. It’s so tall. She has to bend her back to
even see the underside of the conical roof.
Is that what that’s
like?
She approaches the
wooden door, which has a large metal knocker with the face of an ogre
holding a ring between its teeth. At one time, people thought that
such knockers could off evil spirits who might try to invite
themselves into the home. These days, they only indicate that the
owner can afford decorative metal ornaments.
She knocks three
times, and waits.
Several moments later,
she hears mechanical clicking behind the door, and it opens.
There, dressed in the
plainest civil garb she has ever seen him wear, stands the Honourable
Ro Danest, Consul of Adena.
Yet, he does not gaze
at her with any condescension to speak of. He only inhales sharply,
as if trying to stifle a sigh.
“Cytalis Trelen,”
he says, with a soft smile. “Please, do come in.”
No guards flank him.
He is alone. He steps into the darkness.
She watches him for a
moment, then, looking over her shoulder, she crosses the threshold,
and enters the tower.
She recalls the first
time she came here, that smell she couldn’t place. She realises now
that she wasn’t smelling anything at all, but the absence of
it.
The stink of damp, the
acrid stench of smoke, the sickly-sweet smell of spilled ale; not
only will you not find it here, it has never been present here. The
drainage has good upkeep, people do not burn their rubbish to keep
warm here, and the only liquors to imbibe are fine wines. This is a
place that has never known squalor.
It is a beautiful
smell, and she hates it, because it reminds her of where she has come
from, and where she is going, and what she can never have.
She removes her coat
and hangs it from a hook by the fireplace, which is aglow with yellow
flames. She’s wearing her best clothes, the ones she wore when she
first met him – the mantle and the fine tunic.
Danest pours two
glasses of wine, and offers it to her.
“Please,” he says.
“Drink.”
Something in his
voice. He’s hiding something.
She takes the glass,
examines it, holds it under her nose. Nothing out of the ordinary. It
just smells of wine. Nevertheless, she places her lips to the rim of
the glass and lets the liquid touch only her lip. She does not drink.
Danest clasps his
hands. He sits on a long chair beside the crackling fire. There is no
sound but for the popping of burning wood.
“How is it?” he
says, staring into the fire, not at her. That he averts his gaze
seems almost perverse. He is the ruler of Adena. Yet, he does not
look at her. As if she were his superior.
“It’s good,” she
replies. The first words she has spoken all night.
“Good. That’s
good. I’m glad.”
There is a long, quiet
interval. Without thinking, Danest rubs his temples with the fingers
and thumb of his left hand. She wants to ask him what’s the matter,
but something holds her back from saying something.
It almost comes as a
relief when he says: “So, this is it, I suppose.”
It takes her a few
moments to understand.
Still, she says:
“What?”
“It’s over.”
He sighs. Tears
shimmer orange on the edges of his eyelids.
“I apologise,” he
says, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “I...tried so very
hard. I wanted to keep seeing you, I did, but…”
She only stares at
him, bewildered. Just like that?
“Look at me,” he
says, his voice a whisper. “The Consul of Adena, crying like a
child. What must you think of me?”
And she sits there in
the flickering light of the fire, and she does not know how to react.
He’s crying because
he thinks he loves me, and he thinks I love him. He expects me to
mourn. He either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care about my
livelihood. He is breaking this off because it is politically
expedient for him to do so. I should hate him. I do hate him.
A moment later, she
breathes in, then places a hand on his shoulder.
“I want to make this
special,” she says. “If it’s our last night together.”
Ro Danest wipes his
eyes.
“I’d like that,”
he says.
He stands, and she
takes him by the hand.
Cytalis has walked the
steep steps up to the top of the great tower many times. It is only
now, as the reality of the situation dawns on her, that she realises
how long it is, how exhausting it is. This monument to excess,
serving no function but ornamentation.
In a sense, this tower
represents everything wrong with Adena. Think of the labour, the
hours, the resources, the materials and tools that went into crafting
this tower. How perfectly hewn is every step. What care and effort
went into this.
And yet, it exists for
no reason. It leads nowhere but a dead end, to a modest bedroom. It
exists for its own sake. It exists for no other reason than to be one
of the tallest and most recognisable buildings in the city. It is a
monument to ego.
And on the streets,
people starve, people murder each other, and people drink themselves
to death. That this tower exists is symbolic of the injustice at the
heart of the Adeni way of life.
The Adeni armies fight
the long wars and kill men in their thousands while annexing their
lands. In return, men with soft hands commission towers such as this,
while the poor languish in abject misery, doomed from birth.
Ro Danest could end it
all in a heartbeat if he chose, but he does not. It isn’t only that
he is opposed to the idea on a purely abstract level. It is that the
nature of his ideals means that he sees such an act as impossible.
In some way, he thinks
that Cytalis, and people like her, deserve to live the way
they do: Uncomfortable, fidgeting, always struggling, never relaxing,
most of their thoughts occupied by nothing but money.
Danest is at the
wooden door at the top of the tower. He pushes it open, and holding
the door, he gestures for her to go inside.
She smiles, entering
the room. The familiar smell of perfumed bedsheets here, of old wood
and cut stone.
Danest closes the door
behind her, and bolts the door shut.
He stands for a moment
at the door, as if in thought, then turns to face her.
Saying nothing, he
walks up to her and places a kiss on her lips. It is a kiss she did
not ask for and does not warmly receive. She tries to pull away, but
now his arms are around her, and she feels trapped.
She finds him
disgusting. So why is she reluctant to leave?
He lets go, at last.
“It’s so wonderful
to see you again,” he whispers.
She feels something
within her take hold.
“I want you on your
knees,” she commands.
He pauses for a
moment, stunned by her bluntness. Then, as though weighted down, he
sinks to his knees, to the cold, hard, stone floor.
She slips her feet
from her sandals and pads over to him, drawing his head to her lower
stomach. Shaking her head, she runs her fingers through her long,
wavy hair, pursing her lips.
Danest whimpers.
She grips the hem of
her skirt in both hands and lifts it, revealing her vulva to him.
“I want you to eat
me out,” she says. “I want my taste to never leave your tongue.”
Ro Danest goes red in
the face.
“Really?” he says.
“Yes,” Cytalis
replies. “I want you to make me come before I give you what you
want.”
His lips tremble. He
smiles as if drunk. And his head dips between her legs.
He kisses her labia.
Her breathing quickens. She moans.
“Yes...ah...yes...”
She looks down at him,
his hair still done up in pins.
She feels the warmth
of his tongue now, licking, tasting inside her.
She sighs
affirmations, guiding his head with her hands.
She feels as though
she is on fire.
He licks the length of
her, followed by smaller licks along each side. His tongue enters
her. She gasps. She feels her hair stand on end.
Exaltations spill from
her mouth. Things fall away from her for a moment. That hot bubble
swallows up all her concerns, all her misgivings about Ro Danest,
rising up through her entire body.
She comes with enough
force that it almost knocks her flat on her back. She has to pull
away from him, falling back on the bed with a moan, then a sigh. She
places a hand to her chest and feels her heart hammering, the sweat
pooling at her brow.
She looks to Ro
Danest. He smiles a small smile, one that is happy, but concealing an
infinite sadness. His eyes give it away. He is pleased to have
pleased her, but he knows this will be one of the last times he ever
sees her this pleased.
She sits up, still
breathing heavily.
“Come here,” she
says.
He comes to her,
kneeling in front of her.
She bends down and
kisses his forehead.
She slips her
shoulders from her tunic, exposing her breasts.
Saying nothing, she
draws his head to them. He asks no questions, he only takes what he
wants. He kisses, running his tongue between them, under them. She,
in turn, peppers his head with light kisses.
With deft finger, she
pulls out the hair pins, one by one. His long yellow hair flows down
his back and around his shoulders.
She lets the pins fall
to the ground: Tok-tok-tok.
She watches as
something stirs between his legs.
She smiles, kissing
his cheeks and his neck. Don’t be embarrassed, darling.
“Please,” Ro says,
in a quiet whisper. “I need you to…”
He pauses, shuddering.
Poor thing, so horny he can’t even speak.
“Say it,” Cytalis
says.
“Let me worship you.
At your proper size. Goddess.”
She laughs, touching
his forehead with a finger.
He sighs with
gratitude, and she watches him start to dwindle at her feet.
She places her head in
her hands, studying the way his clothes loosen as the limbs that bear
them become thinner and weaker.
Almost unconsciously,
her hand passes between her legs.
A few moments pass.
There before her lays
a pile of fabric.
The fabric stirs, and
she watches the miniature figure of a man pull himself out of it, his
penis erect, his slim limbs betraying a life lived without even a
moment of manual labour.
There is Ro Danest,
the insect, gazing up at her in awe.
Cytalis stretches a
leg towards him, pointing her toes at him. He looks down at them a
moment, then back up at her.
“Worship me,
insect,” she says, fingering herself. “Show your Goddess what she
means to you.”
She raises her toes,
then the sole of her foot.
The enormity of her
foot compared to him seems to dawn on him. He is so reluctant to
indulge, sometimes. She finds it rather endearing.
“Go on,” Cytalis
urges, sternly. “Don’t keep me waiting.”
Now Danest obeys. He
kneels, placing his tiny hands on her heel, and kisses.
“Good boy,” she
says. “This is what you really want, isn’t it?”
But he does not hear
her, lost in worship.
“Where you belong,”
she says.
She is vast. So much
vaster than him. His view of her right now is a wall of flesh. She
pleasures herself, imagining how she must see him, how much more
powerful she must seem…
Must seem? She is
more powerful than him. It is only by the violence of the state, and
her own conscience, that she does not exercise that power. She has
the most powerful politician on the planet under the sole of her
foot. This is not an aberration. This is the world, just for a short
time, balanced as it should be.
She gives a small
smile, and a swift and gentle motion of the ball of her foot, knocks
Danest on to his back.
She stands. Her shadow
alone seems to have weight. He lays there stunned, gazing up at her,
at the great monolith of her body, at the two vast trunks that are
her legs.
He does not move.
He is so small she can
scarcely see the expression on his face. But she does.
It’s terror. Pure,
delicious terror.
She raises her foot,
and he does not run, nor attempt an escape. He only cries out in
shock as she lowers it inexorably upon him, at speeds that must seem
so impossible for a being of her size.
Her sole engulfs him,
eclipses him. He is beneath her. Right where he belongs. This is his
true state of being. Insects belong at her feet. Not lording it over
her with fine wine and obscene wealth.
Hate? Love? She
doesn’t know any more. She wants to make him understand. Understand
what it is like to not know what is going to happen next, to feel
like it could all be gone at any moment. If she leaves him with one
parting message, let it be this. She has to make him understand.
She shifts her weight
on to the ball of her foot. He writhes beneath her, frantic with
terror, but she does not care.
He screams once, and
she feels something
snap
A wave of nausea rises
in her stomach. She retches, stumbling backwards.
In the dim light, she
can see him – his broken body, lying in a crumpled heap on the
ground.
Like an insect.
To her surprise, he is
still moving. He writhes in pain. Cytalis crouches to look at him.
The weight of her has twisted his arm and his leg. He moans quietly,
flinching almost from her gaze.
Part of her feels
guilty, of course, as any person would, but another part of her seems
only to examine him with curiosity.
I did that?
With nothing but a
simple step?
But still that nausea
bubbles in her stomach. She realises at once that it is guilt. She
anticipates retribution.
Danest gazes up at her
in disbelief.
“Why?” he says.
His voice is almost inaudible for the weight of his despair.
She shakes her head.
“You’ll never
understand,” she says.
“I thought…” he
croaks, stifling a sob. “I thought you loved me…”
“I did, too,”
Cytalis says, bitter as coal. “But then you showed me just what I
meant to you.”
Now Danest’s misery
turns into hatred and rage.
“You vicious whore,”
he says, venomously. “I’ll see you hang for this. This is
treason.”
Cytalis rises,
standing to her full height.
“Is that all I’ve
ever meant to you?” she says. “Another inferior? An underling?
Just a second ago you were carrying on like you loved me. Now you
want to hang me.”
And Danest seems to
retreat from her gaze, with sudden awareness of the danger he is
still in. For she has not restored him to his full size.
“Do you know what
it’s like down there?” she asks. “Down in the New Village? With
all the dirt and rubbish, as the price of bread climbs higher and
higher? While you live up here, looking down on us as you sip wine
and eat the finest meats.”
She bends, gently
picking him up. He cries out.
“If you knew what a
day in my life was like,” Cytalis says, “would you even care? Or
would you just make excuses for it? Can you even conceive of a world
in which I am anything more than a toy for you?”
As she holds him with
coiled fingers about his waist, the irony of that statement is not
lost on her. But she must not be complacent. This is still a very
powerful and very dangerous man. But part of her still holds out
hope, somehow.
She walks to the bed
and, still keeping him held tight in her grip, seats herself,
maintaining eye contact the whole way.
“This will be the
last you see of me,” Cytalis says. “But by the time you are back
at your normal size, I shall be long gone from here. And you will not
find me.”
Danest sobs in pain,
then snarls.
“You tried to
assassinate the Consul of Adena,” he hisses through his
teeth. “My men will find you. They will kill you.”
“Will they? Are you
sure? Do you want to go screaming to all Adena that you’ve been
fucking a – what was it you said, a moment ago? A vicious
whore?”
Danest, wracked with
pain and rage, seems lost for words.
“You duplicitous
bitch,” Danest growls. “So, is that it? You’ve only ever been
after my money?”
Cytalis raises her
eyebrows.
“You really are a
dumbshit, Ro.”
“Don’t you dare
call me Ro,” Danest spits. “I am your superior—”
Cytalis squeezes him
about the waist with the smallest movement, silencing him instantly.
“Not at the moment,
you’re not,” Cytalis says. “Insect.”
Danest looks up at
her, his mouth agape.
“All I’ve ever
been to you is a trinket,” she says. “A toy to forget in the
bottom of the chest. You only call me back here when you want a fuck.
And you mistake that for love. And maybe I was stupid enough to
mistake it for love, too. But I’m done now. You watch people suffer
and die every day, and you think it’s your right to let it go on
happening, because the alternative is unthinkable. You coward.”
She holds him right
before her eyes, gazing at him so hard she wonders if he might burst
into flames.
“You are not my
superior, Ro Danest. You never were. I am more powerful than
you will ever hope to be. I can do things you will never be able to
do, experience things you will never be able to experience. You’re
barely even worthy of worshipping my feet.”
Danest keeps his mouth
closed, now. He only glares at her.
“You’ll return to
your normal size within the hour,” she says. “Tell your men what
really happened, if you must. But I’ll be long gone by then.”
“Gone?”
Danest says. “And where, exactly, are you going to go?”
Cytalis Trelen wears a
small smile on her lips.
For on top of Danest’s
dresser is a coffer.
Despite the pain of
his broken body, Ro Danest summons enough energy to make his eyes
eyes bulge almost out of their sockets.
The coffer begins to
shrink.
*
Beyond the river basin
of the meander on which the antecedents built the great city of
Eyros, there are a set of high hills. It is the main way out of
Eyros, which, lacking defensive walls, relies on the hills. The hills
are steep, rocky, and often cold.
And yet, to Cytalis
Trelen, they mean freedom.
She does not know how
much she took from Ro Danest. Definitely not enough to render him
pauper, but enough for her to live on, for a little while. Yes, the
journey ahead of her is dangerous. She does not know if Ro Danest
will heed her words. Maybe he will stake his reputation on having her
killed. Maybe he will succeed. Maybe he won’t. She cannot
afford to live her life on maybes.
She comes to a rest at
the top of a large hill, perching herself on a large rocky
protrusion. She has with her a drinking flask, which she filled from
a stream along the way. You can see all of Eyros from up here.
Below, people go about
their daily routines. They work, eat, and sleep. And all around them
are the wonders that labour made. Those ancient ones who once
sheltered around embers in caves now live in warm brick houses. And
the serf, who once had to spend all their time scraping together some
meagre means of survival; fetching firewood or hunting game, now has
time for reading.
Yes, what was once
unimaginable is now normal. And she can only imagine that, even if
they find her, even if they kill her, that someday, the world will
belong to people like her. For in their hands is power greater than
all the armies of Adena. Greater, even, than the Changing.
She is a Changer, that
power is innate to her. But all the starving and dispossessed have a
power, too; a power that takes the most miserable existence and from
it creates wonders.
Ro Danest will rule,
but she knows that she has taught him a lesson that he will not
forget in a hurry.
Beggars exist not
beneath the wealthy, but alongside them. That the ruling class are
allowed to continue to live as they do is testament to the
transcendental good will of the impoverished. But they can push even
that to its breaking point. And when they do…
Her eyes scan the
skyline, and she spots it.
A tower, poking out
from the cityscape, that but a day ago she stared up at in awe.
How tiny it looks from
up here, she thinks.
Then, saying nothing,
the woman known as Cytalis Trelen slips away.
And even her
footprints will be washed away by the rain.
End.