The City of Banners is a classic drawer novel, only without the being-written part. I have many jewel-toned entries into this setting and only one that stands as a proper story. I give this one to you: Shai, the City of Banners, and her citizens. It’s called The Courtship of Oroma Liathen. (image from pixcrafter)
Oroma Liathen strode the streets of Shai with legs like pillars. Beneath the street banners that lent their incomparable dyes to the City of Banners, she walked in a kindred trail of fluttering feathers and glowing silks. It is of some interest to watch her path through the city, from the great stinking harbor where she buys her fish past her pink cottage and through the sloping terraces and up one or another of the Stairs toward the series of high white buildings at the very top, the precipitous University.
She smelled of flame when you approached her and salt air when she left you behind, leading to any number of startled traffic snarls. The changeable perfume was a defense she requested against suitors, as she intended to establish herself as the foremost academic at University before the age of thirty. That the perfume would take such unusual form was beyond her powers of prediction.
She passed between the man who would be her husband and the man who would speak the longest at her funeral, and they were strangers. She passed on, leaving a scent cleaner than the harbor and more soothing than her approach. The man who would be her husband stared, and picked up one of the feathers from her dangling hairpiece.
Oroma carried her temple in her broad body, knowing no one would come to worship until the place and the time she chose.
*
That morning she had quaffed the potion she had bought from the apothecary Folo Garedi after yesterday’s eclipse. It was fresh, energized by the vanquishment of the sun. She drank it all.
She felt it as she walked the wide sloping street toward the Stairs. It was a brush on her hair, a warmth in her ears, a strange underslip that rubbed her wrong.
Men were looking at her.
They looked at her hair under its feathered headpiece. They looked at her clean callused hands. They looked at her jutting breasts and her pillar legs. They sought her eyes and she denied them.
Folo’s potion had failed.
Men called to her, honeyed words, the ones she remembered from when she was fourteen and had not yet known to commission the potion of non-love. They had been candies in baskets she did not want; now they were delicacies in a shop she hadn’t meant to enter. To be pelted with cake is not to feel nourished.
She hurried up the narrowest and most winding of the Stairs. At the top she plunged into the crowd, seeking anonymity, seeking a morning unsweetened.
“Good lady. I think this is yours.”
Oroma dreaded, but the voice was kind, and in her flight perhaps something had fallen. She turned.
The man who would be her husband stood there. He was a weathered laborer. The feather in his hand was nearly a foot long, stiff, bright red. Oroma had a dozen like it in her headpieces. In fact, this one might have fallen out.
“This is yours,” he said in a thick accent from a place Oroma could not imagine.
He was short and handsome and honest-looking. He held out the feather in anticipation, between fire and water.
Oroma disciplined her hands to her sides. “Not today, good citizen. Nor yet tomorrow. It will be a year yet before I wish.”
“Wish what, good lady?”
“For someone to desire the smell of flame.” She would go to Folo and get the correct potion that very day. She would only abandon it and its scents when her work at the University came to a rest, when she had professorship, when she had an academic throne. Then, then she would speak with handsome honest-looking men. “You came too early.”
“I will bring you a feather for each day,” he said. “With your eggs in the morning, or with your inks at noon, or with your walk home at night.”
“Save them.”
“Three hundred and sixty-five, good lady. You shall have the full measure.”
“You are a stranger to me. Why would you promise a year that you aren’t certain I want?”
“Look at yourself and tell me a man in his right mind would not try.” He smiled and clasped the red feather to his chest. “Tell me no if you wish, good lady. Otherwise, watch for feathers.”
And after that day she watched for feathers. Fluttering from the walls above, gently slipped in a crowd without further contact, wedged into the gate jamb of the University.
She resolved, at length, to gain his name.
“Stranger!” she cried in the crowds. He was coming to her up a ramping white street, between merchants and laborers and weary fishermen. “Stranger, what is your name?”
“I am Jakkar ne Balsam,” he said. “Good lady, what is your name?”
“I am Oroma Liathen, and tell me, for I might forget a suitor in my year of freedom: is there a feather for today?”
“Do you think me faithless?” His feather for her was a plume, all green and jewel blue. She laughed and tucked it into her hair. “Jakkar ne Balsam, in three hundred and ten days I will kiss you.”
“The birds have learned to fear me,” he said, laughing, and fell back into the crowd.
One day of fearsome sun, when the scent of the harbor stood in solid blocks all through the streets, Oroma found suddenly a patch of shade held over her head. It was Jakkar, and he walked beside her holding the fan of blue feathers over her.
“Jakkar, you fool, that’s two weeks gone at once!”
“Then I shall miss you for a fortnight,” he said. “Keep this against the sky’s follies.”
So their days went. Oroma began to fashion a cloak. The silk that she developed in her cool shadowed laboratory formed a trellis for the feathers, from shoulder to shoulder blade, elbow, waist. Jakkar did not seek conversation or distraction. He appeared, and gave, and smiled away.
Then the wind changed.
Jakkar waited outside Oroma’s laboratory, spinning a symmetrical white feather between his fingers.
“Oroma,” he said, touching her name with reverence, “I have been summoned by my lord. It is war in Havilia.”
Oroma was a woman of wide comprehension, but not this. “Havilia? What is Havilia? You must stay and protect Shai.”
“Would that I could. Be true, and I will be true where I go.”
Oroma shook her head, hard. “In one hundred and thirty days I will kiss you.”
“In one hundred and thirty days I will be in service.” He brought up a cage he had had at his feet. “I know not why we are going. I bring you a songbird. He must provide you feathers for a time.”
Oroma did not look at it. “I will count them every day until you return.”
“Oroma, I would that you could wait for me at my side. Fare well.”
“Be blessed. May She walk beside you.”
“Only as a placeholder.”
Then came dark days, days of research from before dawn until after the comfortless sun had gone down behind the University’s walls. Oroma cultivated worms and spiders. She spun and wove in glistening webs and breath-infused patterns. She sought a silk strong enough to hold her flagging heart in place.
She went often to the University’s observation deck and looked at the birds over the sea. She thought, obscurely, that to be in love and alone must be a difficult thing. Then she returned to her work, and to her bitter sparrow.
It was later, much later, that Oroma happened to be in the Hospital, testing her silk of fortification about the wounded.
On the docks, a ship unloaded.
A man on either side guided Jakkar’s stumbling feet off the ill-favored ship. He carried no sword. The wound to one side of his stomach stank.
He hauled a sack of feathers like a shield over the side less stricken.
One tier above the harbor, the Hospital of Shai sprawled to the cliff’s base and crept to the lush slope to the northern bluffs. Women in white looked once at Jakkar’s stance and signaled for a stretcher. Jakkar’s helpers returned to the sea. Jakkar was carried to a small white room and settled on a bed.
“Is there someone?” said a woman, fully prepared to outpour pity.
“If she can forgive me for calling to her early,” he croaked. “Please, tell the scholar Oroma.”
“Ah, she is near,” said the woman.
And Oroma came. With a bundle of silks under her arm and wide eyes, she came. He breathed his breath to the edge of the pain in his gut.
She leaned over him, studying the indoor luminousness of his face, and somewhere two stars fell into one another. It was right, it was the only way to make the sky correct again.
She stopped. “Ah, I have promised not to love you for thirty more days.”
He gestured weakly to the brown gunnysack of his promise. “I owe you thirty more feathers in addition to this,” he said.
“But you cannot gather them,” she said.
“Have faith,” he said. “I must keep my promise if you are to be able to trust me.”
“My trust in you has already survived a war.”
“Go, Oroma. Do your work. Have the career you desire.”
But she came back with spiced wine, and with her feathered cloak.
Then she went to work and released the sparrow.
That evening when Oroma sent for supper over her work she first received a child dusty from an afternoon’s climbing. He held in his hand a great albatross’s feather from above the city. “This is from Jakkar, who thinks of you,” he piped.
Oroma packed up a length of fortifying silk. She went home.
The next day she thanked Jakkar, and dressed his wound, and went to work. In the evening a shopkeeper came to her carrying a grackle’s feather from merchants’ row. “This is from Jakkar, who thinks of you,” she sang.
The next day she thanked Jakkar, and dressed his wound, and went to work. In the evening a fisherman came to her with a puffin’s feather from beyond the harbor. “This is from Jakkar, who thinks of you,” he rasped.
So it went, as news of Oroma’s courtship spread to every quarter of the city. A chicken from a farmer. A pigeon from a priest. A hummingbird from a gardener. A songbird from a schoolgirl. Oroma extended the cloak of feathers. She tended Jakkar. She counted not days but hours, not hours but seconds like slipping beads, each tolerated only to reach the next.
She demonstrated her healing silks to the panel at the University. They approved her assistant professorship. Jakkar laughed and did not ask to kiss her, yet.
Jakkar rested under the cloak of feathers. He received gentle tending, and the silk of his bandages strengthened without clinging. All was ready for a joyful day.
As the day when he stood, to greet Oroma in the doorway.
She had not drunk her potion. Her coming did not smell like flames, and he knew that if she left him she would not smell of the harbor. But this was conjecture: she was not here to leave him.
“It has been one year,” she said.
“You have the full count,” he said.
“I love you, Jakkar ne Balsam.”
“I have nothing but what you made for me, Oroma Liathen. Marry me, and I will fashion what I can in return.”
“You left me free to work my calling instead of wooing me.”
“I wooed, good lady. Only in frivolities, but I did. I never wanted to steal your time.”
Oroma reached out. “Take it freely. Until my latest formula dries and I must rework it.”
“More than I could ask. Let me admire ambition, and curiosity…and your eyes in this light.”
“You ask me to be myself.”
“No more and no less.”
The hospital released them. Jakkar draped the cloak over his shoulders. They walked hand in hand in the deluge of sunlight, and a grubby boy cheered for them, and a shopkeeper, and a fisherman, and so many more: and the priest ordered flowers before they reached him for the banns. Oroma Liathen was to be married, and her veil would be made of feathers.
No link, no further story. That’s all.
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