The emissary has heard of the City of the Vanquished his whole life, seen a hundred garish paintings depicting its grim wonders, but he realises that somewhere in his heart he has never quite believed in its existence until now, seeing it with his own eyes.
His party travelled for many days by horseback to reach the famed great valley, but now he walks towards the City’s gates on foot and alone, having left his companions camped on the far side of the mountain pass. That is one of the City’s many laws: it will admit only one guest at any time, and those rarely.
It is an honour to have been chosen for this mission, judged to have the right qualities of strength and pragmatism for what lies ahead. He will be one of a very few people in the world to ever step inside those walls. Once this might have thrilled him but his work has taken him to too many cruel places and he wishes now that he could simply turn around and walk away.
The sun is rising slowly behind the City, throwing great loving orange arms around it as if to protect it from him, this foreign interloper. The City’s famous architecture is only visible as silhouettes, and it is almost possible to believe those dark towers are like those of his own home city, though perhaps somewhat neglected, given their strangely uneven shapes. One tower looks dangerously crooked, like a gnarled dark tree bent by years of wind. There had been a tower like that many centuries ago in a country that no longer exists. A leaning tower that finally fell. He remembers a drawing his father once showed him, one of the drawings that lit a fire in him to see the world.
And look at where that has brought him.
A mile from the City a welcoming party rides out to meet him in a dusty storm of hoofs and wheels. He is an invited guest and as such he receives the familiar honours. Two of the City’s senators dismount, approach and bow deeply, their eyes radiating barely concealed hostility. He returns the bows scrupulously, and hides his own distaste at being here. He is sure he is safe, despite the glint of swords strapped to the guards’ belts. The City is said to treat its guests well – the voluntary ones, at least. But safety isn’t enough. He needs to leave this place with more than his life. He needs to leave with a treaty.
The emissary rides with the senators in a carriage. The older of the two speaks to him in his own language, rather well. It’s the only pleasant surprise of the ride. As they approach the City down the Boulevard of Justice, the senator points out the statues that line it, and watches the emissary’s face closely as he explains who they are and why they have been so commemorated. The emissary nods expressionlessly as if it is all very interesting, very unique, carefully threading a line between tolerance and disgust.
The City of the Vanquished might not have been considered a city at all a few centuries ago, but in these diminished times it boasts one of the larger populations in the realm their two nations share. Its citizens are said to number in the tens of thousands. Perhaps more than a hundred thousand if the slaves are counted, which, by law, they are not.
They enter the City through a gate flanked by two grim, squat towers. As they ride into their shadows, the Senator explains their design and their symbolic significance, makes a few unpleasant jokes about the notorious mechanics of their operation.
The emissary learns nothing that isn’t already known from previous emissaries and defectors, but he does learn something new for himself through his senses. The towers reek. Of perfume, yes, but underneath that a baser, ranker stench. He is sure the towers will have been soaped and hosed in preparation for his visit, but there is only so much that can be done to overcome brute physical realities. This is true of all cities, after a little time has passed – they are shaped by the materials used in their creation as much as the ingenuity of their architects. Limestone cities crumble, steel and glass cities grow dull and shatter, wooden cities are lost forever to rot.
They alight and the emissary is led into the Hall of the Victorious. He had been told it was grand in scale, but is unprepared for its magnitude. It might be as large as the crumbling cathedrals of Old Europe, which is staggering given how it was constructed. Once inside, the emissary feels unsafe for the first time. He remembers the crookedness of that tower he saw before, and he would like to inspect the walls, to reassure himself of their stability. But he dare not. His diplomatic training no longer feels like armour he wears. It’s a thin veil that might easily be seen through or torn away.
He is given a front row seat for a performance of some ancient tradition, half dance and half martial art. The music is undeniably beautiful, high fluting sounds that fill the whole hall, underpinned by lithe, sinuous percussion. It’s halfway through the second dance that the first droplet hits his scalp. He jerks reflexively and then masters his body with great effort, resisting the urge to look upwards, or wipe the moisture away. By the time the second drop falls, and the third, he is sufficiently composed not to flinch. Everyone else does likewise, pretending there is no rain inside at all. The emissary wonders at the constant determined effort it must take to live in this city, to enjoy it. Yet when he looks at the faces of his fellow spectators, he sees no strain at all. He sees pleasure and complacency.
At the end of the dance, the performance mutates into something that the emissary knows is newer, a miniaturised dramatisation of the last war. A famous enemy atrocity is gorily re-enacted, one that the emissary knows from his research is almost certainly apocryphal, and then the stage is filled with two dancing armies. One army, representing the people of the City, is dressed in bright robes, and wields elegant swords. The other army, representing the vanquished enemy, is greater in number and duller in dress. They lumber around the stage with heavy axes, roaring like apes.
After a long and eye-rollingly theatrical battle dance, the brute enemy are inevitably defeated by the valiant warriors who then reenact the first building of the City of the Vanquished. Harsh horns blare from concealed musicians and the gentle percussion becomes thunderous as the towers rise. This crass triumphalism seems like a direct challenge. Dare you question our strength? Dare you question our rectitude?
After the ordeal is over, the emissary is told it is time to meet the ruler. But first he must wash, naked, in an antechamber, watched over by a blank-faced slave child.
They say that this shower is a ritual sign of respect to the ruler, that all who enter his presence must be clean. This is nonsense, of course. It is an exercise in humiliation and a sign of paranoia. They want to be sure the emissary conceals no devices. The people of the City still cling to a superstitious fear of electronics, even though it has been centuries since that knowledge was lost. This fear is not unusual. All the remaining nations dread that one of their rivals will one day rebuild the machines that nearly erased the species. Even if one did want to take that path to damnation again, they could never succeed. The machines were the final link in a long chain of accumulated knowledge shared across nations of billions. That chain was shattered when the bombs fell from all the skies. It cannot be recreated by any of the pitifully diminished successor nations alone – if at all.
The ruler receives his guests in the famed jade chamber, set within the furthest recesses of the great hall. The emissary has read about the chamber many times, and is faintly disappointed by its reality. The jade is duller than he had imagined. But, of course, its purpose is not only ornamental. Nothing said or done under its gleaming roof and within its solid walls can be heard or seen by the enemy eyes or ears that are everywhere, all around.
The emissary has been warned the ruler is charming but finds himself knocked off-balance by his gentle amiability nonetheless. Though he’s old, he speaks with fluid passion of the City and its history, why its existence is just and necessary. His tone is so light and persuasive that the emissary finds his hostility briefly wavering. Then he remembers the statues from the boulevard, and his revulsion returns. None of this internal skirmish is visible: his face has been carefully trained to keep his secrets.
Besides, he is not here to discuss history, morality or justice. He is here to talk trade, mutual interests and regional unrest. When the ruler is finally done with his justifications and his boasts – and that is what they are, no matter how disarmingly expressed – the emissary steers the conversation to these practical matters.
The discussion is slow, with the ruler or his senators contesting every assertion the emissary makes, no matter how innocuous. As time grinds on the ruler speaks less and less frequently, evidently finding such matters tedious. The emissary takes note of this and will report it, perhaps a sign of the ruler’s decline. It’s left to his senators to argue over every last detail, with a stubbornness that puzzles and frustrates the emissary. Do they actually enjoy this sclerotic dance?
From the moment he saw the statues, the emissary had hoped to complete the negotiations before the day’s end, but by the time a late lunch is announced he is beginning to despair. The senators are truculent in their demands for stronger guarantees, a regular supply of arms, and the removal of forces from the surrounding region. The emissary already knows he may have to cave to most of these demands, but his task is to conceal his nation’s desperation for the valley’s mineral and metal resources, while keeping concessions to a minimum. The less he gives away, the faster he will rise through the diplomatic ranks. He may even be posted to Old Europe. How he longs to see those Cathedrals with his own eyes, no matter how shattered they may be.
The lunch is obscenely extravagant: rare birds, real pig, fruits that can rarely be grown in the cooling but still-scorched climate. The emissary had been sure at least one of these fruits was extinct. They eat in the great hall, of course, for such lavishness must always be witnessed. These are the fruits of victory, after all. Despite himself, the emissary cannot help sighing with delight as bright new tastes burst in his mouth. His pleasure curdles when he feels another droplet rain down on him from the ceiling. The fizzy sweetness in his mouth turns sickly and he almost gags as he tries to swallow a last mouthful.
The negotiations still aren’t concluded when the sun begins to set. The emissary knows that he now has no choice. He must sleep in the City of the Vanquished, the first of his people to endure this honour. His prayers have not been heard.
After an even more extravagant dinner accompanied by another dance, he is finally taken to the guests’ hall, which stands across a small square from the great hall. Its walls are only a tenth as high, and the space inside almost intimate. A curtained bed chamber is arranged against one wall. He smells soap and stench again. He hurries into his opulent bed, far too soft for his own tastes, and blows out the lamp as quickly as he can
Pressing his face into a plump, perfumed pillow he tries to think only of the negotiations. He can still leave with a reasonably good treaty, he believes, but there are some obstacles still to overcome. Closing his eyes, he conjures a map of territories and resources, and mentally roams through it, searching for what he can surrender and what he might claim in return. His people will need the City’s support – or at least their neutrality – when his nation launches its planned preventative war against an unruly neighbour. This mental mapping is partly his training asserting itself and partly a way of quelling the horror pressing in at him invisibly from every direction.
He needs to sleep. He must. He needs to be rested and sharp tomorrow, to outwit those droning senators… But he can’t sleep. How could anyone inside these walls?
And yet he does, because when the wall speaks to him it startles him awake from black and twisted dreams.
“You have to help us,” the voice whispers, in the emissary’s language. It is raspy with extreme dehydration and disuse, and there is a strained note that the emissary recognises. Pain. Physical pain.
The emissary lies very still, hoping that the voice will realise its foolishness and return to its lawful silence, or think him asleep and give up.
“You have to stop this,” the voice continues. Thank God it is dark and the emissary can’t see the face that is speaking. It is so close that he guesses it must come from the first or second tier of the walls. He doesn’t have to imagine the agony and exhaustion that face wears. He has seen it often enough today, though only for brief snatches before he wrenched his gaze away.
It is late in the lunar month so the man who is speaking must have been bound in place for more than three weeks now. When the moon is full, the City of the Vanquished will be disassembled and reassembled, as it is every month. The ropes that bind living bodies together to form the City’s walls and roofs will be cut, and the disentanglement will begin. Some will slip and fall during these challenging manouvres, and be dashed apart on the stones below.
Those who do not fall and have survived their time in the walls will be granted a month of recuperation and rehabilitation. They will then return to their slave duties for four more months, before returning to be bound and raised again as towers and halls. Their fellow slaves will be the ones who bind and hoist them, under the eyes of the City’s armed guardians. They will watch in silence as their conquerors live their luxurious lives and perform their mocking festivals and rites under the shelter of their own bound bodies. This is their punishment for being the defeated, and the vengeance visited on them for once having been the conquerors.
Another voice hisses from the ceiling. “Your people must help us. You know this is wrong.”
The emissary prays for silence. What are they even asking for? It has been this way for hundreds of years, these two peoples engaged in a pitiless and ceaseless war, battling eternally for dominion over the great valley. Each people has taken its turn as the defeated, and been brutalised and enslaved as punishment, until they found the opportunity to fight back and reverse the order of things. Neither will ever relinquish this land to the other. Nor will they exterminate their enemy: slavery is an addiction, and once a people gets used to its conveniences, it can be hard to give up. Perhaps vengeance is an addiction, also. If the enemy was gone, whose face could you rub your victory in? Would your triumph feel as real if it was not witnessed by those you had triumphed over?
It is the ruler’s arrogant belief that creating the City of the Vanquished has finally broken this cycle. The enemy can’t attack the City, for the City is them. They cannot burn it down, as they did 80 years before, because the walls they burnt would be their fathers, brothers, and sons. The City’s very existence weakens them in more direct ways. The strongest men are always chosen for the walls, and fed and watered very little during their month bound together. This leads to less unpleasant excretions, but also leaves each man weakened, disfigured and disabled, permanently neutered as warriors.
All night long, the walls whisper to the emissary, telling him of their torture, of the monstrosity of the victors. He is aghast at their audacity in breaking the law of silence, but he will not answer them and nor will he report their crime. He buries his head beneath pillows and tries to ignore them. He knows what their punishment would be for such transgression. Tongues would be torn out or hearts pierced. It doesn’t matter if a few men die during their month in the walls. It’s inevitable and welcomed. The City of the Vanquished exists, in part, to instill a paralysing fear in the hearts of the enemy – of all enemies. A diet of corpses keeps fear fat.
Or perhaps the whisperers’ fate would be even worse than that. Perhaps speaking to an emissary is a particularly grave crime, one which would cause them to become one of the statues on the Boulevard of Justice. Permanently bound, forcefed, tongueless and exposed, they’d live on as sun-ravaged symbols of what becomes of those who break the City’s laws. The emissary is a good man, a civilised man. He will not deliver any of these poor souls to that fate.
At some point one of the men above begins noisily weeping and a teardrop lands on the back of the emissary’s neck. Had it been tears falling earlier in the great hall? He had imagined it was sweat. Perhaps it was both.
He cannot bear one more moment inside these walls. He fumbles in the dark and lights the lamp again. He stumbles through the room, refusing to look at anything but the wooden door, though the walls seem to writhe and palpitate in his peripheral vision. He loses his balance as he gropes for the doorhandle and his fingers briefly sink into sticky, moist flesh. He recoils, only just swallowing the scream that rises from deep in his soul.
He staggers outside into the sacred escape of the open air. Two waiting guards leap to their feet, hands on their swords. Between ragged breaths, he speaks to them in their language, and says he would like to walk around the City. They assent, following him.
He slowly calms as he walks. He allows himself to look at the towers and halls, dimly lit by the near full moon. The City is much easier to look at from outside than inside. The walls and ceilings of the City always face inwards, so that the eyes of the vanquished face and witness the lives of their conquerors. They watch silently as they eat, drink, laugh, and fuck beneath them.
From outside and in this dim light it’s even possible to imagine the walls aren’t made of humans at all, just oddly misshapen and oversized bricks with a sun-scorched brownness to their surface. Only the bindings, the cloths wrapped to catch their meagre waste, and the little cracks between imperfectly matched bodies betray the truth.
The emissary loops aimlessly around the moonlit streets, past the many sleeping halls and towers, his mind churning with unwelcome thoughts, until dawn breaks again over this ghastly city and it is time for the negotiations to resume. He is made to wait in the great hall and closes his eyes as he sits, even though he knows that this will be taken as a sign of disrespect or weakness. When a senator calls for him to enter the jade chamber, he is almost sick with relief to step inside, away from the eyes.
He is exhausted and something inside him has broken, so he rushes through the day’s negotiations, conceding the maximum he had been authorised to with only mild protests. This treaty will disappoint his superiors and his meteoric rise may become a more gradual ascent or even a decline. But decline would be preferable to staying here for one more night. Perhaps it would be better to be an emissary to the western sea settlements, anyway. No luxurious foods and not much prestige, but no such horrors either. At least, none so visible. Perhaps he is rationalising – above all, he needs to leave and forget this place.
It is only once he has been escorted out of the City and begins his lonely climb back towards his companions that his mind seems to clear, as if thick clouds had rolled in on it and now finally released their grip enough to let the sun through. The emissary is struck by a hideous thought. What if the walls hadn’t really been rebelling when they whispered to him the night before? Wasn’t it that hellish experience which had caused him to leave so early and with such a poor treaty? The emissary knows that the ruler is reputed to be as cunning as he is charming, – could he have ordered the walls to talk? How else would they have dared?
He will say nothing of this to his superiors, but nor will he report the ruler is in decline.
As he reaches the ridge he glances back one last time at the City and sees brightly dressed citizens walking the streets, tiny, happy, colourful little termites scurrying around the great mounds of the towers. He realises he hates them all, the vanquished as much as the victors. He hates how they have made him feel and think. He hates that he can’t think of anything that can make all of this wrong right. He hates that he recognises himself and his people in the City, that its obscene architecture and bound walls are all part of the same grotesque human tapestry as the strangling treaties and unspoken threats of force that he himself wields in his negotiations.
His city was built from human suffering too, was raised by the tortured muscles and stressed bones of the enslaved, even if it was poverty that did the enslaving. All the cities that exist or have ever existed were built like this, rising from blood, sweat, and tears shed by forgotten slaves or paupers. None of the great and famous founders ever spilt a drop of sweat in their creations.
He thinks of his nation’s teeming, reeking prisons and its war plans and…
No. He will not think like this. This is the City, sickening his thinking. His people are better than them. It isn’t their fault that this world is ugly, cruel and brutal, and that living in it demands compromises.
The walls of the City will fall one day, he is sure, or find a way to break their bonds and fight. One day the victors will again be the vanquished, the wheel will turn, and the restored conquerors will unleash their vengeance. What follows the City of the Vanquished may be something worse still. The men in the walls have surely had time to think of many monstrous schemes while bound and watching. Whatever his future holds, he hopes he will not return to this hateful valley, will not see what comes next. The forgetting grows harder with every year, with every newly witnessed horror.
Notes:
When I first saw the Imagined City playlist I presumed I would choose either The Specials’ ”Ghost Town” (one of my favourite British number ones of all time, a strange and staggering achievement) or Angelo Badalamentii (who I revere for his work with David Lynch and the Pet Shop Boys) as my inspiration.
But it was a song that I’d never heard before, Brian Eno’s “In Dark Trees”, that set my mind immediately down the boulevard towards my imagined city. Those haunted, discordant moans over the shuffle and bustle of a metropolitan beat made me imagine a city which was a hell, and yet in which people somehow survived. A few of these exist already (I won’t name them) but I wanted to invent my own.
The idea of a city made of human flesh came to mind with an ease which is probably alarming from a psychological perspective. At first, I thought this was meant to be a science fiction story, one where human bodies had become resources (shades of the Matrix) and bio-engineered to become fleshy streets, homes, walkways and bars. I imagined a city purely composed of flesh, but the logistics quickly defeated my imagination
Yet the idea of a city of people wouldn’t leave me and I started digging around in the dusty attic of pop culture which is my memory and pulled out an old Clive Barker story, from his astounding and never-bested “Books of Blood” collection– “In The Hills, The Cities” follows two tourists in what was then Yugoslavia, who stumble upon an ancient ritual between two towns locked in an old, semi-friendly rivalry. The peoples of the town are bound together into two giants composed of an entire population that must then combat each other. It’s an unforgettable image and clearly wasn’t forgotten by me. Another image came from “Jeepers Creepers”, a horror film of two halves: the first is as brilliant and terrifying as any horror made this century, the second– once the monster is seen – mostly cliched and tedious. That first half provided one image that has never left me: our young doomed hero plunges down a tunnel into an underground torture chamber. He finds a light and we see, though he doesn’t, what is everywhere above his head. Dead bodies, sown and bound together, like a ceiling staring down at him, faces locked forever in torment.
My own imagined city is the bastard child of these two horror stories but it was nurtured on a diet of daily news. The story was written at a time when at least three wars were often on my mind. There was Myanmar, which I had travelled to and loved almost limitlessly, but which was in the intensified throes of a civil war that has burnt for decades, and was again being forgotten by the rest of the world. The others were the much better reported conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. All three conflicts shared one quality above all: the fact that people of different ethnicities and/or cultures lived close together on the same lands, but were unable to share them peacefully. Ancient enmities played a role, a thread leading back to Clive Barker’s story of Yugoslavia, which has now become several European states which are still stuck in cycles of vengeance and hatred and where we may soon see new wars.
For most of the media and the world, our attention span is appallingly short when it comes to wars. Myanmar proves the point. Long-burning civil conflicts often seem intractable and the question “what are you going to do?” quickly turns from one of urgency into a purely rhetorical surrender. We quickly learn to accept unacceptable status quos, as we did with Gaza until a few weeks ago. We avert our eyes and we forget.
That’s what this story is about.
It’s also about a city made of flesh, and if that sounds like a schlocky horror concept, you aren’t wrong.
Here are my answers to the prompt questions.
– How big is your city? Is it the densely populated centre of a state? More small town than bustling metropolis?
I quickly realised I wanted this city to be isolated and relatively small. I’d imagine the mechanics of a city built from human walls are not infinitely scalable. I could have gone into the past to create this city, it reminds me of certain Biblical and Medieval horrors, but I chose instead to go into a future, distant enough that our world no longer resembles the one we are clinging onto today. (This also helped me ensure this story couldn’t be seen to be directed at any one war or people). It is in fact a city state of the kind that sprang up around Greece and Persia, and persisted in many places into the middle ages.
– How old is your city? Is it ancient? Brand new? Are it’s origins lost in time? Is it still half built?
It is new, created in the last forty years or so at the time of the story. It is an unsustainable city, I believe. I don’t think the city survives for many decades once this story leaves it. I don’t imagine it ends well for the people who live within its walls, nor well for those who are the walls.
– What is the climate in your city? Arid, temperate, frozen?
It’s a hot city in a world which is much hotter than ours, climate change still wreaking havoc long after the machines that fuelled it are defunct.
– Who runs your city? A far off central government? A corrupt mayor? An elected council of peers?
This is a centralized, dictatorial city, led by a royal ruler with absolute powers. I had certain petrostates in mind when thinking about this aspect.
– Who lives in your city? A stable, but aging population? An influx of young people hungry for opportunity?
Like classical Athens, I imagine it as a city where slavery allows its population a great deal of liberty. It may even be creating great poetry and art, just as Athens did. It’s uncomfortable to think that so much of our finest art and philosophy was born from a culture built on slavery, but those are the facts. I think a lot of its inhabitants are directly related to the ruler, and in an early draft explained much more about the royal family and the likelihood that many of the births in the City were the result of the ruler’s lusts. Then there are the slaves, both those wall-bound and working the fields outside the City, delivering luxurious living to the victors.
– What does your city look like? Venerable red brick and stone? Shining glass and metal? Paint peeling wood? Crumbling concrete?
It’s made of living human flesh, baked dark brown by the sun. I think that’s enough said, and the mechanics are explained somewhat in the story. I didn’t really want to think too closely about this, I wasn’t trying to write the Human Centipede, though there are obvious practical challenges to living in a city made of living human bodies.
– What is the source of tension in your city? Is it big or small? Power shortages? Bribery in high office? How often the bins are collected? Does it ever erupt into full blown conflict, or does it keep itself to muttered complaints and buried grievances?
I hope the story answers these questions. The tension is the same tension that the Spartans must have felt every day when they looked out on the Helots, their strong slaves harvesting their fields. One day, those scythes will be on our necks and not our corn. This is very much the tension I wanted to explore here. Conquerors and oppressors may rest easy in their beds at night, but they probably shouldn’t.
– How does the city feel? Is it much loved and welcoming? A faceless and uncaring place to scrape a crust? Somewhere once familiar but now strange?
The answer to this question would be the same for any city. It depends what bed you sleep in at night. How a guest experiences a city will be very different from how the powerful experience a city that they feel belongs to them. And that is very different again to those at the edges or bottoms of society (the slaves or the labourers or the migrant workers or the homeless or the zero hour contract strugglers). The same is true of the City of the Vanquished but to a heightened degree. Do its ruling class sleep easily in those walls? I truly do not know. I know I couldn’t, but I am not them, and the British Empire reminds me that the vast majority of British people were perfectly content when we were brutalizing a vast swathe of the world for our own gain. I suspect if I’d been born in the 19th century I would have found a way of accommodating and justifying the Empire in order to achieve that peace of mind. I suspect you would have too.
Jaime Gill is an award-winning writer and creative whose journalism, features and fiction have been published around the world by such titles as The Guardian, BBC, Wanderlust, Bangkok Post, and Phnom Penh Post. He was born in Britain but left in 2014 and is not responsible for any of the country’s decisions after that date. He works for development organisations across South East Asia and lives in Cambodia while working haphazardly on a novel, film script, and far too many stories, three of which were recently longlisted in international contests by The Masters Review, The Bridport Prize and Elegant Literature.