Read Online Ink by Hal Duncan - Free Book Online Page A

rich earth flowering with the scent of memory. The door swings closed behind us.
The
Castle and the City
    It seems to go up forever.
    “Now that,” says Guy, “is what I call grandiose.”
    “Peachy,” says Jack. “Want one.”
    The Duke's Keep rises over the city as a giant among ants, skyscrapers for its buttresses, all mirrored glass, its walls drab slabs of concrete dam stretching between them, a perversion of a Gothic cathedral. It is as if somebody took New York and rearranged the skyline, placing this tower here and that tower there, finding the symmetries and complementing shapes and heights and, having done so, they then built a wall of concrete joining tower block to towerblock, mute gray between the glittering glass, and built it higher, higher, just to prove that commerce's great spectacle of a city was only the building blocks of their great scheme. The wall of it rises into low cloud but you can make out the crenulations of the buildings bridged with blocky iron towers, topped by domes or spires, a more ancient architecture perched up on the precipice's tip, like gulls’ nests on a cliff. Yes,
grandiose
is one word to describe it.
    We trundle on toward it, through a city which is nothing if not humble in comparison. Here two or three stories are the norm and most of these squat concrete, sometimes painted in sun yellows or sky blues or peach, with fading adverts on their sides, for washing powder or some other product of that old forgotten and fantastic world we used to call reality—so many look unfinished, half built, with spirally steel reinforcing rods sprouting from their flat roofs like reeds, rust-color stalks stuck in a vase. Small shacks, plant pots and chairs and washing lines among them, speak of these roofs being used as gardens. Here and there one of the houses has three walls of a new level still being built, brick and wet plaster. It's as if all the houses are expanding upward, just taking their time about it.
    I point this out and Joey, dismissive as ever, says it's just a tax dodge.
    Once the house is finished,” he says, “they'll have to start paying tax on it. So if the house is never actually finished …”
    “How do you know?”
    “Seen it before.”
    But the buildings themselves, the roofs apart, are all a jumble of jutting bits and bobs, of balconies and blinds, awnings and louvered shutters, fretworks of quatrefoil patterns running up their heights, more potted plants and washing lines, and I think it's just that Joey has no poetry in his soul, if Joey has a soul at all. I love the confusion of it, the vibrant and organic texture of an architecture so haphazard. It's a city where people live their lives outside, on their roofs, and on their balconies. And on the streets where the palm trees and the rhododendrons rise out of the dust and the kiosks and the cafes, on the verges of the road filled with fast-moving carts and bicycles, and even the occasional car weaving between the curses and scattering pedestrians, women in burkas, men in suits, excited children running alongside this garish cart of ours which almost fits in with its scarlet wood and painted legend on the side and us all over it like passengers on an overloaded bus, Jack and myself up on the roof, Guy in the driver's seat with Don beside him, Joey standing on the sideboards,holding on and looking down in silence through his dark sunglasses at the kids who tug his coat and yammer at him, babbling. I think if it weren't for the legend Troupe d'reynard blazoned in florid lettering on the cart's side in an alphabet so alien to them, so unlike the angular script that plasters every poster, shop and kiosk around us, we might pass without regard, just another bunch of gypsies heading for market.
    Instead old men blow out cigarette smoke and tut at us. Young men frown at Jack's wolf whistles but turn away, shrugging, as I pull him back and thwack his arm. Children chatter and point. Girls watch Joey play it cool. The