Chapter 69 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 69: The Ship of Exile 03
The Gloire had not always been called the Gloire.
When Kenting won its war and annexed Eaton, the king renamed the river, which cut diagonally across the continent, cradled the new capital, and sustained countless common people, to commemorate the nation’s victory. She called it Glory.
From then on, this River of Glory, which ran mostly through Kenting's territory, became the main artery connecting all directions to the Kenting capital — Viktori.
In wartime, it played an indispensable role in transporting supplies and troops. In peace, it became a vital trade corridor. Countless loads of gold and silk traveled the Gloire to the capital, to become ornaments of the April Royal Palace and the castles lining its banks, dressing their banquets in splendor.
For the common people who lived on this continent, the Gloire, one of the largest freshwater rivers on the continent, fed countless cities, towns, and villages from source to sea. A mother river in every true sense.
Poets sang of her. Composers honored her.
In the magnificent concert hall at the center of Viktori, the piece called Dawn on the Gloire had become a timeless classic. No matter how many times it was performed, people could still close their eyes and listen closely, letting the beauty of the music wash over them.
"White Stork" had been traveling the Gloire for nearly a week, and the further north they went, the heavier the spring chill became.
Winter in the north seemed not to have fully released its grip. In February, when the south had already burst into green, mornings still brought frost flowers crystallized on the cabin windows. A swipe of the hand left a cold wet streak behind.
They were nearly at Viktori now.
Lucita pulled her coat tighter, pushed open the cabin door, and stepped out onto the deck.
The morning mist was thick, water-haze stretching in every direction. Through it, faintly visible, the sleeping city on the bank and the distant mountains shrouded in fog.
White birds skimmed the water. The sound of oars came softly.
Lucita drew in a deep breath of cold air. The bracing wind woke her fully, and she rubbed her eyes.
She had been standing only a short while when she noticed what appeared to be a boat approaching in the distance.
She fixed her attention on it. She watched until it came close enough to make out clearly: a small, battered, single-masted wooden boat.
She was momentarily puzzled.
On the Gloire, this principal artery of transportation, the most advanced ferries went constantly back and forth. Even sailing vessels were generally the larger two- or three-masted kind.
But this boat was not only small, its style was extremely old, like something a village fisherwoman might use.
What would a fisherwoman be doing on the Gloire?
A sailor nearby adjusting the anchor answered her unspoken question: "That's not a fishing boat. It's one of the fool's ships that goes back and forth between these cities. We always steer well clear of them."
"What's a fool's ship?"
“Well, as the name says,” the sailor replied. “The people on board are either simple or mad. The asylums can’t take them all, so they’re put on that ship and set adrift. They stop at one city or another from time to time, scrounge up some food, and go on living like that.”
"That's how it is? How long can they live like that?"
“Not very long. The rest of us can barely feed ourselves. No one’s going to give them that much food for free.”
The sailor chatted idly as she set down her anchor chain and called to a colleague at the stern: "Coming, just a moment!"
The busy sailor returned to her work.
Lucita looked at the boat.
The fool’s ship had no helmswoman and no visible figures on deck. At a glance, it looked like a ghost ship out of some medieval legend, drifting through the mist in slow, aimless silence.
The crew had probably long since abandoned these poor souls.
A gentle northwest wind was blowing at this hour, and the fool's ship was drifting south with the wind and current. Fortunately, "White Stork" had someone at her helm, and with careful maneuvering they passed without any collision.
The two vessels crossed paths.
As they passed each other, Lucita thought she caught the faint sound of singing.
Her gaze followed the receding single-masted ship, settling on its humble cabin.
A ragged leather curtain hung down. Even at their closest, she couldn’t make out the interior, only a blurred human shape.
But she had truly heard it — a somewhat hoarse, somber low singing, like the voice of an old person telling stories by the fire on an evening after supper. Distant at first, faint, and then gradually clearer.
As though a drifting music staff had risen from the cabin, one note after another clinging to the lines, swaying in the air, then fading gradually away with the wind.
For Lucita's ears, "sound" was something that could take visible form, in some dimension she alone could perceive.
The singing was very low. It could not carry far at all.
Lucita reached out as though to touch it, but when her fingers were almost at the staff, the wind scattered it completely.
She drew back her hand, rubbed her fingertips together, and looked once more toward the direction the fool's ship had disappeared.
On the wide river surface, the morning sun had not yet risen, and water-mist drifted in every direction.
The fool's ship vanished into the mist, and was gradually lost from sight.
She looked down at Linnea, who had just come out to get some fresh air: "Did you hear that?"
Linnea's eyes sparkled: "Of course!"
A mermaid's hearing was the most acute of any creature. Linnea went trotting back to the cabin to fetch her paper and pen: "I didn't catch all of it, but I could tell, this is a piece of real quality!"
The busy sailor came back around to the bow. Lucita stopped her: "Is there really no one on the fool's ship except mad people?"
"There used to be, my lord." The sailor, interrupted from her work again, was somewhat impatient. "Originally there were always crew members aboard, but who would want to stay with a bunch of mad people? Many of them took the government's hiring fee, sailed the ship somewhere remote, then boarded another vessel and came back ashore, quietly and without anyone checking on such things. Now the ship has no one to sail it and just drifts. Perhaps hoping the mad will sail it themselves?"
The sailor laughed.
Lucita pressed her lips together.
She couldn’t be certain of much, but the person singing just now was unlikely to have a disordered mind.
That had been a complete melody, low but clear, soaked through with the singer’s emotion.
Sorrow, bewilderment, longing, pain — like a starling that hadn't made it through winter, taking one last look at the sky from the snow.
“It died before the next spring came.
The newly born starling sang its mourning song.
After the second winter descended,
still it praised the north wind and the snow between the trees…”
She hummed it quietly to herself, then looked again toward where the fool's ship had disappeared.
Could an exiled mad person really sing a song like that?
One day later, they reached the end of their journey.
Viktori lived up to its reputation as one of the most prosperous cities in the world. Compared to the equally prosperous Grande, its architectural character was far more orderly and disciplined, with a weighty sense of gravitas.
The last time they had gone to Grande, it had been during the great depression brought on by the plague. So, strictly speaking, this was their first time seeing a human city in full vitality.
Unlike Grande’s eclectic mix of styles, Viktori’s architecture was remarkably unified, with a strong Baroque tendency: mostly two- and three-story buildings in long rows, their facades shaped with horizontal arches. Some had been rebuilt into brick-and-timber construction; others retained white marble as their primary material, trimmed with elegant decorative molding and windows of purple-bauhinia-pattern ironwork.
Small, exquisite figural sculptures were set into the projecting column capitals and platforms, their pupils affixed with gold leaf — Lucita had a vague suspicion this was related to the ancient dragon worship that had been passed down in their distant historical tradition.
It was somewhat at odds with the impression the books had given her. The Viktori described in texts from twenty years ago, praised for its dignified simplicity, had since been patched and embellished until it was smothered in ornament, almost unrecognizable.
The only vestiges of the old days one could still faintly make out were the high churches and monasteries rising at intervals among the low, continuous rooflines: a few soaring Gothic or Romanesque structures, churches of the Creator God, or monasteries housing male friars. Their pointed arches and clocked porches added a note of syncopation to the skyline, like the stern disciplines of doctrine holding human desire solemnly in check.
The streets were already quite wide, but still inevitably crowded. The culprit was the public tramcar running down the center.
The tram clanged its bell urgently. It was the primary mode of transport for most small merchants and clerks, something not even the steam train could replace.
Small private carriages were the vehicle of choice for nobility and major merchants. Those riding alongside on horseback in their riding boots were usually noble ladies, accompanying their brothers or elders on a shopping trip or to some castle for a dance.
In between the carriages, considerably cheaper rickshaws threaded through the traffic. Their main clientele were down-at-heel noble men who had insufficient wealth but still needed to maintain an air of elegance.
Both men, but one sat in the back of a rickshaw while the other, sweating through his shirt under the sun, pulled it. These men not only needed to sell their physical labor while young — in doing so they had developed muscled physiques that cost them the most important quality of beauty, leaving them among the ones still unpaired in the romantic pursuits of young men and women alike.
Two men, both male, yet one sat in the back of the rickshaw while the other hauled him forward, just like those women, sweating through their shirts under the sun. These male pullers not only had to sell their labor while young, but in doing so had built muscled physiques that robbed them of the most valued quality of all: beauty. And so they became the ones most often left unpaired in the romantic scene of young women and men.
That was the role the common people played in this street.
The well-to-do spent money freely here, the poor scraped by here. Along the roadside, the stalls where they scraped by were arranged in rows. Small wooden carts with plank displays: flower sellers, vegetable sellers, bread sellers, sweet sellers...
The only people who paused at such stalls were the clerks stepping off the tramcars, or workers equally hard-pressed to make ends meet.
With horses in the street, Lucita's five lambs were not so conspicuous, and most people looked up once and looked away. At most they wondered briefly why this sheep-seller was dressed rather well.
Someone actually came over and asked: "How much for a sheep?"
Lucita shook her head, explaining "not for sale" as she took hold of the smallest Linnea and plunged into the stream of people, asking as she went for the location of a hotel.
Viktori's largest hotel was on this very street: No. 11, Agate Street. An oval wooden sign was nailed above the lintel, with a row of gilded script in proper cursive lettering: White Pearl Hotel.
True to its reputation as Viktori's largest hotel, it operated across a wide range — from the luxury suites catering exclusively to major merchants, all the way down to the cramped single rooms for peddlers and common travelers. Every level of service was provided, to the point where locals, when "hotel" came up, thought of White Pearl first.
Of course, for clerks and merchants it was more than adequate, but the true nobility and royalty in the eastern district didn’t deign to spare it a glance. The difference in spending was simply too vast.
An ordinary middle-class single woman could live very well on under five hundred gold coins a year, but five hundred gold coins to the truly privileged class was the price of a single disposable dress.
Rumor had it that White Pearl had a branch in the eastern district specifically for nobles, decorated in extravagant splendor and well-regarded even in aristocratic circles. But that was beside the point.
In any case, when Lucita led her sheep inside, she found the hotel lived up to its name in one unexpected way — it had a dedicated back yard and sheep pen where she could house them.
Granted, that appeared to be an enclosed stable. According to the attendant, it was where guests' horses were kept. Business hadn't been particularly brisk lately, so there was always space.
The lodging problem temporarily solved, it was already dinner time.
The front hall of White Pearl was a restaurant of considerable refinement. After several days of travel, they decided to indulge a little and enjoy their first proper meal here.
Roasted lamb chops, mushroom soup, a spring special of asparagus salad...
The soft scrape of knives on plates, in a pocket of quiet. The thin red light of evening poured in vast sheets through the glass windows, falling over their table.
Outside, the foot traffic remained busy. Unsold fresh vegetables began to be marked down. The fish in their water basins were slowing, and "reduced" signs had appeared on them too.
The home-cooking uncles who specifically went out at this hour to buy discounted produce came out together with their baskets; vendors from farther afield began packing up their stalls.
The evening light was nearly spent, yet everything still churned on.
In every corner of this city, countless happinesses, and far more sorrows, were unfolding at this very moment.
This was Viktori, the city of Victory, cradled by the River of Glory.
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