City of Metal

 In these shining streets where the saloons roar and night comes to life with headlights, packs of smokers gathered by the doors, and the commotion of merrymaking voices, weeping shadows, the jester is most nervous. Sober faced among florid cheeks, he took his place on the dias, and in the far back in the shaded seats he saw among the drunkards aspiring souls watching him with enchantment.

Far from this strip scented with belched alcohol and perfume, where the aspiring dancers don’t get tempted by the charms of grill teethed wife beaters and trailer hauling neckbeards reeking of southern tobacco, in a time long before music existed solely condensed to virtual digits between software panels, when genius architects constructed rooms with solid surfaces to keep voices and sound bouncing between the walls, where smelters made blocks of dense black metal that absorbed sound and carried it along its length.

In these times before lore, when mountains stand where now hot sand blows, when deep lakes thrashed where there is now fertile plains, a city of musicians started with a wall of these blocks, and before these engineers used a calendar to mark the celestial movements the walls spread out into a city of fountains and marble.

From all over, harp players and fiddlers came to the protection of the musical walls. Naked bodies let their arms and legs hang off the top of wall as they bathed and listened to music from the bottom, sipping wine from the faucet. White bell towers rang, and dancers performed the hour rituals in the street around the sundial.

To the gates on a dewey morning came a small, frail girl. The Porter did not lower the door. Other unwashed, ragged gypsies gathered at the moat, trying to crawl around the stakes and barking hounds. Some even tried to dig under the walls, only to be crushed by their own mound of rocky dirt.

This girl stood by the front gate, and when she told the Porter she came to be a signer he asked for her proof. She weighed fifty six and stood at 5. Her nose bridge flat and imbedded between her elongated eyelids. No cleft on her upper lip, her spine hunched and knotted. She opened her mouth and gasped, and let out the start of a hymn she heard the eagle cry as they swept to hook pathetic creatures. Yet the excitement of her journey and the slope up which she climbed left her heart exploding. Her blood ran cold, then she felt tired. She kept trying to sing, but she already fainted. The Porter saw the gypsies start to rifle her clothes, take her shoes, gloves- then he released the hounds to chase them back to their caverns. He took inside but said he’d remove her in a weeks time.

She met princes and their retainers atop pleasure tower pools, but no one gathered to watch her sing, and her lyrics went largely ignored by the talent that crushed her under their boots to win the affection of the princes. Without a prince to support her performances, she spent the allowed time harping in the streets for the drunken vagrants sleeping beside the great music hall columns.

The Porter and two officers found her sleeping on arena steps. He gave her a bill. She lost her voice when she saw the price for residence. “I’m a singer, not a tavern wench!”

“Sorry, but if they find out I let you in- if you want to stay you’ll have to take a job.”

“But this will take fifty years to pay off!”

“There’s interest too. But you’re talented. Maybe you’ll find yourself entertaining someone of substance, not the other urchins.”

She went to the taverns and looked among the sunken faces of disappointed maids scared by shattered pieces of their squandered ambition. Statues of fabled bards ushered her along the taverns, and their shadows blocked the windows.

The madam treating her to the ways of the wench showed her what she’d be wearing, and showed her where she’d be serving. This wench sighed because how of lazy her apprentice was. She didn’t pick up dirty chalices, she never washed plates or forks, and stood in one place while everyone else worked humming to herself and swaying as if no one else wanted to. The wench took her behind the tavern and slapped her hard enough to make her ears ring. “There is no place here for that foolishness. You are too inbred to be looked at, and not elegant enough to listen to. The city of granite is where we belong. There, they understand that music is falsehood.”

The girl decided to leave the city before the princes garnered her wages. She went far off past the red mountains, and the blue mountains, and black mountains, where the glowing musical city diminished under haze, becoming dimmer and dimmer each night until she found the valley of smoke and ash. She covered her face to breathe, and walked slow to remain hidden from the giants that dug their fists into the earth and ripped out lithium ores and chewed them. She waited until they finished eating to avoid their staggering path.

Winged lizards gathered around the steam of red craters where they built their nests and fed their young melted igneous stones. The creatures shrieked and clawed at each other, bit and ripped their ears off, then flew high into the smoke clouds to scatter them.

Past the craters she found herself transverinsg a desert of gray dust, with the granite clocks echoing over the barren expanse, and chimneys of gray ash blasting into the sky and raining over the ground.

She entered the city barefoot, her clothes black with soil and face covered so avoid choking on the sandy wind.The mask concealed her hominid features among the short trolls of the granite city. Short foreheads with squinty eyes, and teeth grinded flat, they carried hammers and pickaxes in their belts wherever they walked. She came to the center of town by the great cogs of the city clock.While they pressed levers, machines cut rock, and buckets of charcoal poured onto conveyor propelled by trolls twisting cranks.

She stood by the empty fountain and strummed her harp. The trolls ignored her at first then stopped what they were doing to observe in confusion, then dismiss her like a madman proclaiming he can heal with his urine.

That night she spent in the tavern, and invested the last of her money on liquor, unprepared to venture back to her village or starve in the wastes. A troll in gleaming battle tackle entered and came up to her with an invoice from the Guild of Craftmasters commissioning her as cobbler apprentice. She groaned, but the troll warned her “We are workers here. We have no need for songs. You will be an apprentice, or you will leave.”

Already rejected from the city of music and marble, she came to the swept streets and gardened homes of the elite craftsmen and ladies. Down this lane she found a four storied castle with a great workshop in the place of meadhalls. Instead of goblets and aged bottles the cobbler kept tools, rippers, stitchers, sewers, pinchers, hookers, sinkers, and biters. Also, assortments of the most gorgeous footwear she saw- that put even the royal concubine’s feet to shame. She asked him if they’d be making such shoes.

The troll laughed at her and handed her a warped boot. Each layer pierced, the steel on the heel cracked, and the bolt on the toes too tight and stabbing the sole, all softness worn out to solid sleet. The laces frayed, the clips broken, and the heels peeled apart. The toes of the previous owner fell out.

As she worked, her harp fingers toughened, and she learned that each tool made its own sound. As she delivered the repaired boots to the miners and laborers, she noticed they each wore distinct, and tailored footwear. The ordained leather rich with embroidery lived short life spans being challenged and strained. Even after a year of abuse, mistreatment, neglect, marching in the mud or walking through a carpet of sparks, pierced by nails and even burned- unlike her harp, they only became more beautiful.

She asked the trolls if she may lace up their boots. she liked the sound they zipped up, and when they stamped the granite streets her heart bounced. She listened to them as they heroically toiled with their machines, drills, and anvils.

The next time she came to the town center the trolls watched her with bemusement and murmured about the strange girl who came from where folk spend all hours frolicking and bumming. Instead of harping, she gave them something they never heard of before. She used sheets of metal and stomping boots to create a sound of tumultuous storms that resonated like dropping hammers, and the sizzling of cooling steel.

The emissaries come to buy ore from the mine came from their rooms to see what made their skin curl. Their heads ached and their guts shrunk in fear. When they looked out the window they saw the musician and at once came out, clutching their pearls, shouting “how dare you do this to music?” only to be intercepted by the masses of trolls enjoying the attack of drumming, of pouring magma, of crafting blades, and heavy blocks being pulled by rope through harsh shrapnel deserts.

The trolls listened to her as they worked, and they found her music aligned with the clock, and they kept their mind to their beloved work under the repetitive beat she seduced them with. In time she found a way to use empty bells to project her music over the city, and the trolls soon gathered around her to emulate the music she invented for them. Louder, angrier, more powerful than the idle strumming the pasty, soft bellied princes of the marble city enjoyed.

In time outcasts, castaways, exiled heretics, untouchables, and the unwashed rejected from art academies came from all fathoms of the world to learn from her- the Music Master of the Granite City, and as her hair grayed and she found herself unable to leave the comfort of her bedding, still young wayfinders came to touch her hand and hear the growls that immortalized this new breed of sound.

Upon her death the Craft Masters tasked their finest engineers with building her a tomb worthy of the enlightenment she graced them with. The inscription, “She came to a City of Granite and Made it into a City of Metal”.

When the city of marble sent its dignitary to purchase her secrets, they made flutes from his bones, drums from his skin, and a tuning fork from his forceps. The head they sent back in the mouth of a tuba with the first song she wrote transcribed shoved into his own mouth, titled“The Cry of Melted Marble.”