The City, the City

Mithraeum in Pompeii

When you see its streets and walk its sunlit arcades for the first time, the impression is of scale. The doorways are ten feet tall, the ceilings of the apartments twenty feet. Stairwells are broad and open. Construction is based almost entirely on serried arches, arcades, courtyards, terraces, and broad openings used interchangeably as windows and doors, which are gated with iron grillwork. Every part of the interiors are touched by sunlight and wind. Inside, the floors are sometimes bare stone but more often colourfully tiled, and glazed tiling is also commonplace as wall decoration - sometimes it is even used for roofing, though dark clay and red terracotta are more usual. 

The great bulk of the built city is its apartments, the habitation of the citizens, which, to a Baronial, look like watchtowers or fortifications. They are very tall, usually four or five stories, and broad at the base, built around a broad internal shaft such that the sun can enter the internal rooms on both sides. Sometimes they stand alone, surrounded by smaller allies, but more often they are erected one after another in long runs along the broad white stone streets. Each apartment houses a single citizen. Those of wealth and status are able to trade and buy apartments of greater size or better position, but all citizens have one by law. Each great tower complex is accessible by an iron gate, and the keys for each of these are manufactured only by the Palace. It is a great crime in the City to reproduce them. 

The Emperor gifts its citizens shelter, food, and water. All citizens' apartments are fed by aqueducts built along the line of their roofs, and each individual allotment has its own drinking supply. These outlets run through the building, feeding troughs and cisterns and even internal fountains, and then into broad gutters that run down the centre of each of the great public streets. They wash the city clean, of blood, shit, refuse, until only the wet, white stone remains, shining in the sun. The non-citizens draw water from public wells. The Empire also runs large eating halls at the Palace's expense, where anyone, citizen or no, can eat without payment. 

Each room, no matter its height from the ground, will be open to the weather - the style in the City is open windows on all sides, nearly as large as the wall they are placed in. Most will install grills and gates over these openings to stop unwanted access, but some choose not to - especially this is an affectation of great players of the image game, and is thought to signify their confidence in their own ability, their great pride in being untouchable, undestroyable, open and impossible to harm, even without securities, even vulnerable to the imposition of any stranger. 

The rooms themselves will be sparsely furnished in iron and occasionally timber. Often the aqueducts feed cold (or hot, for the very wealthy) bathing areas built into the tiled floors. Often there will be a cask of petrol to burn in the kitchens. Subdivision of the apartment rooms, should it become necessary, is accomplished with mobile timber screens. There are also glass screens, which give separation without privacy, and have various convoluted cultural associations - they can be used for flirtation between intimates, by friends looking to enjoy one anothers company without directly interacting, and sometimes in the play of the image game, to indicate where a relation between two things has been introduced or insisted on. The White City has a great love of stained glass, but, unlike the Barony, with its intricately-worked portraits and scenes, the Citizens prefer enormous sheets of a single, intense colour, worked into mobile panels that can be installed in the room as needed. Thus an entire space can be stained red, blue, golden, at the whim of its inhabitant. 

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Outside the apartments, the streets are laid out on many levels. They are broad enough to support arcades along both sides, where stalls can set up and trade, and where citizens walk or play the game. They have a verticality; it is as though the City itself were terraced, and by moving across it you also move up and down its various levels and partitions. You can buy and sell things with silver, gold, ceramic, and electrum coins from a thousand cities - the merchants will accept your tender. The City mints no currency of its own. It is understood that its limitless wealth is of a different kind. 

The arcades are broad, shaded, and pleasant, and sunlight gleams of the quick-flowing channels that run down their centre. Where are the citizens? They are resting, or at work on some play or manoeuvre. They are about their business. The gangs of the White City are not so primitive as those in the Barony. The gangs are sprawling networks of operators working toward mutual ends. They are open to infiltration and subversion, and they are constantly undermining and merging with their competitors. Each player knows the tolerances; can feel them on the skin; when to go and when to stay; when to speak and when to disappear. Sometimes someone overplays their hand, someone is killed in the streets, stabbed or lynched by enemies. The best is to become no one's enemy. You may not know, depending on who has put themselves against you, how you came to be targeted. There are many things you can do to make yourself dangerous in some ambiguous, potential, to-be-seen type way. The murder of citizens is not legal, but it is also an understood component in the workings of the City. You have shelter, food and water, you have your security. You need to learn the tolerances if you would go hunting for that other thing, for glory and status in the eyes of the others like you. It is not a small thing to play. 

The non citizens, the mercenaries, fixers, labourers, and slaves, live in crowded barracks in the arcades, or at the foot of the city walls. The soldiers live with them; and attempt to insulate them from the strange calculations of the citizens. It is something like hostility, but cleaner, dead-eyed, with its feints and simulations, its total victories and total defeats.