H - Hatra

The Cermaliyne Mountains were rugged and steep, an exposed spine that wound their way through the continent like an angry snake. The few passes through them were rugged and steep, and any attempt to cross them where a road had not been blasted through their peaks was courting disaster. Since the cataclysm, time and a lack of maintenance made most roads through their spires fail. Tunnels collapsed. Bridges fell into deep ravines and were washed away by rivers of toxic waters. Today, there were only three passes through of which Ambassador Deven Orell was aware, and Hatra sat on the central one.

What should have been an avenue of commerce was nothing more than a pipeline for war. Hatra and Ersona, two ends of the same worm, could have thrived together. Instead, they bled apart.

Deven watched the mountains pass, brilliantly lit in the sun. After several days of travel from Yelli, the solar train bearing the ambassadors approached their destination of Hatra. It was a clear day in summer, hot and still, where waves of heat filled the horizon with dancing mirages over the vast desert that had once been the Trythys Sea. Hatra was an ancient city, and had been in antiquity an important crossroads, both as an important port of trade and also a fortress guarding the legendary, narrow Kreidelen pass that wound through the impassible Cermaliyne mountains.  In the early years, Hatra had been a hub of commerce, culture, and art. That was before the cataclysm. The city was barely a shadow of its former self now, with much of its population shoehorned into tightly-packed tenements that would have been called slums in Yelli, and a fringe settlement of seedy reputation and crime, where good people went to die.

Deven sipped his rose tea and contemplated the dark mirages, allowing his mind to wander freely in association, freeing it from constraint as he often did. Seek wisdom in the ordinary and the random, his father had taught him. What would the dark fairies of the sky offer him today? Though the mirages swooped and morphed as the train sped through the barren landscape, their meanings today were hidden to him. “Blast,” he muttered.

The woman opposite him at his table, an emissary from Hatra sent to guide him to his post, sat straight as he spoke. “My lord Ambassador?”

He sighed. His frustrations were not the fault of the emissary, rather they lay with those that consigned him to this backwater wasteland. “It is nothing, abebi” he said, using the Yellish word for favored companion. He sipped his tea. “It is simply that I’ve grown weary with this journey already, and we have yet to reach our destination.”

“All of Hatra awaits you with joy,” she said. Like everything she had said to him for the week they had known each other, her words were suffused with pleasantries. He had no idea what the woman really thought.

It is time to test her.

“Hatra is a backwards shit hole,” he said flatly, watching her eyes for a reaction. “It is good for nothing but turning waste into medication. And whatever barbarity occurs on the pokka field.” No matter what else she might have been, Landra Yun was well trained. For all of her reaction, he may as well have said that there was a cup of tea on the table, or the sun was shining, or they were riding on a train.

“We arrive within in a few hours,” she said pleasantly. Then she stood gracefully and departed, leaving Deven to his cooling tea and darkening thoughts.

* * *

Deven’s status allowed him to have the upper level of the train to himself. Unlike those riding like cattle below him, his space was a private, bulbous blister on the back of an otherwise sleek train containing a private lounge, a small office, a dining area, and a compact but exquisitely comfortable bed to sleep in. After his travels, Deven wished for nothing more than to lay his head on that pillow and sleep. Instead, he summoned Landra with the small bell that he kept for that purpose. He sat in the lounge, facing the front of the long train.

“More tea,” he commanded, sliding his cup toward her on the polished stone table. Once she complied, placing a steaming cup delicately in front of him, she turned again to leave. “Stay,” he said. “And sit.” He kicked out a chair with his foot. “I would hear your opinions, abebi.”

“As you wish,” Landra said. She sat softly, as if the pillow was glass. The city of Hatra still hours away, but would eventually appear to their left. Finally, Deven would get to see for himself the storied, walled tiers of the city dominating the foothills at the base of enormous Mount Bayley.

“Tell me of the city,” he commanded. She folded her hands in front of him, a gesture that he had come to recognize as presaging a lecture. “No,” he said. “Not the practiced words of an envoy. Tell me in the words of a girl born of the city.”

“My lord Ambassador?”

“Savior made of cheese,” he muttered, then relaxed his shoulders and smiled. “Let’s try some simple questions. What do you love about your home?”

“Of Hatra?”

He nodded and waved at her to continue. “Please, abebi.” Then he sighed. “I am tired of pleasantries and protocols,” he said. “I would that someone — anyone— would simply speak their mind and tell me the thoughts of their own heads, not the thoughts of councilmen and handlers.” He rose and stepped to the fully-stocked bar, then selected a pair of glasses.

“We’ll start with your favorite drink. And, I’ll start by sharing first, so we can be at ease, you and I. Chamanas is what Yelli is known for, and what those that wish to be seen would choose. However, I much prefer this Yellish whiskey from the Macanda coast. Skappa. It is extraordinary difficult to come by, as any grower with half a mind squeezes all their pitiful grains for every drop of Chamanas they can yield.” He poured himself a measure of golden brown liquid from a bottle.

“Now, for you?”

“I would have chosen Chamanas, before your story, Ambassador.”

“Until we leave this room, I shall be Deven, if you please.”

“Yes, sir…Deven.” She adjusted herself in her chair. “I would very much like to taste the skappa, if that is allowed?”

“Pfft,” he snorted. “I’m an ambassador. Everything is allowed.” He filled her glass and took both to the table with him, setting the bottle between them.

* * *

After two hours of slow rocking on the upper bubble of the train, and several more glasses of skappa, Landra’s posture had lost a small measure of its rigidity. Deven loosed the two uppermost buttons on his formal travel jacket, allowing the placket across the front to fall loosely and ventilation to reach his chest. He would have given that bottle of Chamanas for a window to open.

“So, you mean to tell me they have thousands of kilograms of serviceable metal just sitting in each of those towers? And no person sees fit to ring the bells?” Deven lounged backward in a chair covered in thick cushions and soft, cultivated leather.

“It’s true, Deven. There’s a superstition that if they ever chimed, the sound would strike dead all the children that heard the ring. At least that’s what my elders told me.”

“You’re serious?”

“Daeliss as my witness, it’s true. Though, now, looking back at it, I think they may be making that part up.”

Deven paused a moment for another sip of liquor. “Is it as hard for regular people there…as they say? Surely the stories are exaggerated.”

“I’m sure I don’t know the stories you’ve heard, but I will say that it is likely the same as anywhere. A person’s hardship depends on many things.” Landra raised her eyebrows and looked at her empty glass.

“I’m happy to help you get as drunk as you like on my fine liquor, Landra.” Deven leaned in slightly and lowered his voice.

“But I believe this is our stop coming up ahead, and you may want to switch to a nice dry Mealan tea?”

Landra blushed and gathered her composure. Her return to decorum was very nearly complete in just a few moments, though the dilation of her dry-green eyes would show through in a careful inspection.

“Indeed. You are right on two counts already. Skappa is indeed a much finer drink than Chamanas, and a strong Mealan tea would be most advisable.” She smiled at him, slightly crooked. The smile would give away her warm intoxication as well, but her official duties made smiling almost perfectly unlikely.

As the train approached the final bend before beginning the slow deceleration into Hatra, Deven stepped forward and took a military stance facing forward and to the left. One supple hand held the other behind his back and a few fingers twitched casually as if counting off an unheard rhythm. The sun at his back, the city slowly unfolded from behind an enormous bluff that had once been a great island off the coast. Countless sailors would have seen this, Deven thought. Though there would have been considerably more water.

* * *

“What is the purpose of the settlement outside the walls?” Deven peered through a pair of binoculars as the train slowed on the approach to the city.

“Purpose? It serves no true purpose,” Landra said. “It’s called Bruntside. Though many simply refer to anywhere outside the city walls as the outers. It’s where those that can’t follow the laws go when the city can no longer abide them.”

“Cannot follow the laws, or will not?” Deven pulled away from his lenses to glance at her.

“Either. Both?” Landra shrugged. “They exist in a detente with Hatra. Many of the Bruntsiders work in the mines, or the grub farms. Some join the military and fight for the great houses.” She shrugged again. “The council doesn’t much care what they do. As long as their attention is not drawn to the outers, the council allows them.”

Landra had already pointed out the lower tier of the city, the downpods. From the train, there wasn’t much to see of them; just dark rows of identical construction, the sort designed for maximum concentration of humanity in the smallest space.

“Is there much crime in the pods?”

“The downpods?” Now Landra appeared unsure of what to say.

“This is a question you were told to avoid,” Deven said. “And your hesitation is answer enough.”

“There’s always crime in the dark places where people have no hope,” she said, finally. “What makes Hatra unique in that respect?”

Deven laughed. “We have crime enough in Yelli for two cities. And Yelli has much more…”

“Money?”

Deven gave her a wry grin. He was beginning to like this one. “I meant to say hope. But, I fear, the two are much the same.”

Landra folded her arms, withdrawing into herself. Deven let her be. A career spent reading people had honed his instincts. He had just to wait, and Landra had more to say. The truth, at last.

* * *

#AtoZChallenge