Gorjo City Retirement House

Structure of the house

Decoration of the house

Experience of the house

The upper floor consisted of a large round room with a high ceiling and high windows. They had wide eaves and some sort of cooling system in place, so the room was filled with sunlight and fresh air and not at all hot. And hanging along the steam-bent beam that encircled the room were hundreds of glass floats twinkling and catching the light.

there was a balcony encircling the tower. There were no other tall buildings nearby—no doubt another attraction to a wizard—and the views were of Mama Ituri on one side, the Son and the sky ship dock next over, then the city to the northern part of the Outer Ring, and finally the lagoon and the Bay of the Waters a darker blue behind it.

Cliopher scribbled notes about the floats and about the need for the windows to be cleaned, the walls washed, the trim polished, some of the woodwork fixed.

Paint the stairwell white,

Rhodin gave a great cackle of laughter as he followed him down the stairs. At the bottom, however,...

Cliopher made several notes about the more obvious problems in the main sitting room.

… walked through into the dining room, then into the suites. He came to a halt in the farthest from the sitting room, at the great louvred-glass doors facing the square. He stood there, looking out at the water lilies in the central pool, watching people walk across.

. He set down his writing kit on the display ledge running around half the room.

Shall we go down to the kitchen?

Cliopher sat down in the window-seat,

He wanted something to anchor his stories. He looked around aimlessly, at the empty room, half-imagining it full of his own belongings, his few treasures.

He led them back into the kitchen. It was still a cheerful and beautiful room,

He went over to the tiny door that hid Saya Dorn’s shrine. He opened it and found what he expected, the little board painted with a copy of the first state portrait of the Emperor Artorin Damara.

looking out the kitchen window at the courtyard.

Cliopher had moved around the kitchen table to the bench,

ATFOTS

(he would not have thought of that bright teal for the entrance hall, but it set off a collection of Western Ring yam masks to perfection).

The ground floor was still a maze of haphazard divisions, disguising the original clean lines.

The courtyard was shared with the house opposite, forming a sort of private area with access on one side to a small inlet leading onto the nearest canal. In Cliopher’s universe the courtyard was paved and boring; the people across the way had a jumble of useful things by their door, potted plants and a patio table and a washing line, and Cliopher’s side had a bathing-house. The bathing-house was still there, and some of the paving. The rest was utterly transformed. Cliopher turned slowly about, taking it all in. He didn’t bother hiding his interest and astonishment: it was a glorious place. The space was oriented around a stone hearth in the centre, which held what looked like a more or less permanent fire burning merrily on it. Low woven platforms surrounded the fire, with a few wind and shade awnings strategically placed. Beautifully stacked wood encircled the seats and provided fuel as well as a visual delineation of the space. That was the centre: the fire of civilization. The rest of the courtyard was crammed full of a riot of food plants and flowers.

Perhaps his Ghilly would be able to help him turn his courtyard into something like this. Except he wouldn’t block the view.

Cora took him back to the parlour and winked at him as she opened a cabinet at the side of the room

there was a clear space with a bench to look out on what he’d always thought of as the perfect view. Half a dozen houses all aligned to frame a long vista to Tahivoa lagoon and the distant rim of the southeastern barrier islands.

79%

standing at the edge of the boardwalk that extended out from the courtyard between their houses.

He hastily manoeuvred the vaha into the generous pool that served the two houses—and as he furled the sail, Fitzroy jumped onto the dock and took the painter.

… bounded up the short set of stairs leading to the courtyard.

There were only the two houses on this courtyard: Saya Oyinaa’s had a bit of an addition that formed an ell with the main building, whereas Saya Dorn’s old house—their house—rambled across the other side of the square. The public square was reached through an alley between the Oyinaa house’s extension and a shed of some form beside theirs. Then the house, and beside them a miniature of the large house down to its little cupola on the roof.

It was very strange to look at the house rising up in all its quirks of architectural flourish—the spiral stair painted a clear bright blue, the upper balcony, more of a covered terrace, running along the courtyard side of the house; the little balconies off various other rooms, some of them at odd heights because of internal stairs; the arched windows at the top.

as he walked across the courtyard. “What’s this little building?”“The bathhouse,”

There was a ground-floor courtyard door, but Cliopher led Fitzroy up the spiral stair first. “The kitchen’s on the main floor,”he said, “but let’s look up here first.”

“What about privies?”“There are water-closets indoors,”Cliopher promised. “All the facilities.”“Imagine that,”Fitzroy murmured. And then they were on the upper balcony, and looking in the windows, and coming up to the door.

Leona had done a fine job. Everywhere he looked he saw not the many small signs of neglect and disrepair, but instead a renovation that showed no …seams. Seams was the wrong word. It was more—he could still see the history of the building, the wear and repair that came with being alive. It was not the sterile perfection of the Palace of Stars, where anything broken was immediately whisked away to be magically fixed or else entirely replaced, whole and entire and as if nothing had ever happened.

There were a few places where Leona and her craftspeople had highlighted some element—the carved cornices were painted the same blue of the stair railing and white and a deep ultramarine, so they looked like curling waves carved out of wood; but the one that had broken was painted to look as if the snapped wood was the foam breaking out out of the shape of the wave.

The main common room had been appealing before Leona’s renovations, but it had seemed dim and a bit …tired. Cliopher most remembered the carved plasterwork around the dumbwaiter leading up from the kitchen. The plasterwork had been cleaned and painted—the whole room had been—and now the floor was a fine golden wood, smoothly sanded and pleasant underfoot. The walls were a pale cream, the arches around the doors and windows picking up the same blues from the outside of the house. The room was so beautiful. The glass windows, newly cleaned, sparkled in the sunlight pouring in. The upper floor projected out above the courtyard, with the balcony running along part of the frontage, and the sitting room was thus full of light. And the view …out across the canal to a vista of Tahivoa lagoon, Mama Ituri to one side, the darker Bay of the Waters extending westward along the waters they had so recently sailed.

“It needs decoration,”Fitzroy murmured. “And art, in general.—Assuming you agree? Of course you do—you have beautiful art in your rooms in the Palace. What are you looking so intently at? Ah. Naturally.” This was because Cliopher was staring at the brazier set in the centre of the room, a copper-coated basin quite large enough to hold a sizeable flame. He looked up, at a small circular opening high above, showing a bright disc of cerulean blue. “That’s a clever magic,”Fitzroy said, waving his hand generally. “It’ll carry the smoke straight up to the skylight. I can see what you meant about it being a bit …convoluted, this magic. Mostly it just wants someone to belong to, you know? It’s curling around me like …a cat, cats do that, don’t they? Or a dog? Like it wants me to pet it. The house misses your Saya Dorn.”

There were three suites on the upper floor, their doors a darker wood than the floors, very simple but pleasing in the clean lines.

into the first suite. “So each family, or person, would have their own private spaces …a sitting room, a bedchamber, some storage rooms, that sort of thing. Oh look, these have privies too—not every house would, you know. Then you share the kitchen and bath-house and main areas.”“I see,”said Fitzroy, looking curiously at the rooms. Cliopher hadn’t been into this suite before, and he was delighted to see a deep embrasure in the arched window facing on the courtyard; perfect for a window seat. One room had a pair of glazed doors opening onto the long balcony leading to the stairs. “I like this,”Fitzroy said quietly. “Have you already picked one for yourself?”“The one I liked before was on the other side, facing Zaviya Square,”Cliopher said, not sure what else to say. “You could certainly have this one, if you like it best …”Fitzroy glanced at him and quickly away, but not before Cliopher saw the slight frown, the brown shadow in his eyes. “There are three on this floor, and two more, suites that is, on the ground floor,”he said hastily, hoping that was the right thing to say. Fitzroy hummed noncommittally.

…Cliopher led the way not to the other suites but over to the narrow stair leading upwards.

The stair was still dark and close, though without the effect of being nearly grimy that it had had previously. Now the short, curving stair felt rather like a moment of meditative darkness. Or so he hoped. He almost wanted to stay there, suspended between floors, in a warm, welcoming, smooth-textured dimness, the curve of the handrail a delight to the touch.

“Is this where those upper windows are, Kip?”Fitzroy asked politely,

stepped aside from the top of the stair to let Fitzroy come up the last few steps. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. And then he eased himself to sit on a bench built to run under one of the great curved windows, and watched the unnervingly silent Fitzroy turn around, his sarong flaring, his hair crackling around his head—was magic building in it?—as he took in the space.

Leona had painted the walls and refinished the floor and fixed the cracked panes in the windows, and dusted each of the scores of glass fishing floats so they gleamed as they caught the light. It was a high-ceilinged room, round, windows curving around the entirety of the space and offering a view that looked across Gorjo City to the Gates of the Sea in the east. One huge beam, bent by steam (and perhaps magic) into a perfect circle, held the ribbed beams of the ceiling and walls in what felt like the perfect marriage of tension and repose. It was still cool and airy and full of light, the wide eaves and some lingering magics keeping the air fresh, and the hundreds of glass fishing floats hung around the room, catching the sun and spangling the richly polished wooden floor.

Fitzroy stood in the centre of the room, where there was another circular aperture opening to the sky. It did not line up with the one in the sitting room below, and Cliopher wondered vaguely if there were more rooms on the upper levels that he had not yet noticed. Perhaps there might even be a hidden stair; Rhodin would like that, if there were.

Fitzroy strode across the room to the windows on the other side, and he fussed awkwardly with it until he was able to undo the latches and slide the sash up.

Cliopher breathed in, out, tasting the fragrance of tiarë; he could see the glossy-leaved shrub growing in a pot outside their neighbours’door. He breathed in deeply, letting the fragrance fill his heart. He would have to get a plant for their side, or several.

wind was warm, coming through the window, the sunlight pouring across them in a splash of rainbow spangles from the fishing floats.

“Is there no inside stair?”Fitzroy asked as they returned to the wrought-iron masterpieces leading down off the balcony. “It would certainly be unusual for there not to be one at all,”he said slowly, wrenching his thoughts to the present. “Does that mean you don’t know where it is?”The thought seemed to give Fitzroy great joy. “Could it possibly be a hidden stair? What a thought!”

Leona’s skill and thoughtfulness showed even more strongly on the lower level. The kitchen nearly glowed with its careful restoration, and the rest of the main floor, which Cliopher remembered as being cluttered and congested (and in his mind’s eye oddly, eerily, overlaid with the version of the house he had seen in the other place), was as airy and pleasing to be in as the upstairs. They didn’t find a stair, though they investigated the two suites, and then the dancing room with the reinforced floor—

“Not a fencing room?”Fitzroy teased gently, moving forward suddenly with a flurry of quick, light steps, clearly according to a pattern. Equally clearly he had not realized he remembered the steps, for he reached the centre of the room and stuttered to a halt.

The front door was not locked either, which fact made Fitzroy shake his head in mystification. He pushed open the heavy wooden door and then leaned against it as he looked across the small square in front of them. A freshwater pool filled with waterlilies rested at its centre; the periphery did not contain as many trees as Cliopher’s youthful memory suggested should be there. A later, more despondent memory came up; how many of the great trees, grown in huge containers resting on heavy stone piers, had toppled during the extreme weather after the Fall.

Fitzroy turned around and pattered up to the door, which he patted with a strangely intimate expression, as if it were a living animal he were greeting.

There was a bench and a chair at the table; Cliopher slid unthinkingly onto the bench, the familiar seat of his youth. Fitzroy touched the back of the chair, shook his head, and wandered around the kitchen opening cupboard doors and peering into the many nooks of the space. He disappeared into the pantry,

Fitzroy opened a cupboard and discovered a set of plain glass tumblers. He turned the tap over the great stone sink experimentally, and watched with fascination as it burbled and hissed for a moment before the water came gushing out.

got up to refill his glass and look around the rest of the kitchen. He came to the small door which used to hold Saya Dorn’s private shrine, and before Cliopher thought to say anything, opened it to find the old state portrait of himself inside.

He stood in the middle of the main room, the flame of the sun filling the space with soft, kindly light,

He would have to get paper and ink, he mused, going through the suites he had imagined being homes for Ludvic, Fitzroy, himself. He’d need to write to Ludvic—Fitzroy probably would as well—and to Aioru—He stopped in the second room of the suite he’d half-fancied might be the one he chose. There was a beautiful desk he’d never seen before placed against the wall, between two windows looking onto the square. It was made of striped mahogany, polished to a lustrous shine, with clean lines and a modest set of pigeonholes and drawers. It didn’t have anywhere near the number of either that Conju’s splendid worktable did, but it was still—it was something he had always wanted, and never quite found.

The bath-house was well-lit from skylights. The floor was newly tiled in lovely grey and blue tiles of a sort he’d never seen in the Vangavaye-ve; the walls were covered in a mosaic of waves.

Fitzroy’s harp and the fire-pot went into places of honour in the sitting room. The boxes from the Marwn’s tower were more difficult; after some thought, he tucked them away in one of the storage rooms on the main floor,

Cliopher arranged their few supplies in the kitchen and then went upstairs to the sitting room. It felt a remarkable luxury to be able to go to the desk Vinyë had left for him, choose paper and pen and ink, and then go sit in front of the fire he and Fitzroy had lit, and write.

they entered the sitting room and looked at the merry fire in the brazier, the harp gleaming, the sky a deep royal blue through the ceiling aperture.

they had passed under the great tree on the edge of Zaviya Square, and then there was the front door of their house, with magic gleaming in the windows, just as if … someone really lived there.

T he front hall was illuminated by a soft star of golden light, as bright as a candle, which hovered at the place where the ribbed arches of the entryway came together. Cliopher looked up, bemused. “I hadn’t noticed the ceiling before,” he said. “If you’d asked me I would have said it was flat.”“Nothing about this house is boring,” Fitzroy replied, ushering him down the hall to the kitchen. He ducked inside the pantry while Cliopher leaned against the table,

he caught a glimpse of their vaha, a dark shape against the water glittering with scattered reflections from the windows and courtyards facing onto the backwater— and up the stairs to their main living area.

The room with the brazier —the sitting room— was very dim; there was a rim of light shining out from the lid of the fire-pot, next to the brazier, and Fitzroy lit a cluster of sparkling lights to show that there was a considerable pile of boxes, baskets, crates, and blankets on top of what appeared to be a set of rattan furniture in the middle of the room.

The sunlight welled up slowly, gently, like sunrise in the uttermost east. It overflowed the lip of the fire-pot, pooled briefly in his cupped hands, and then spread out like an opening flower, a softly whelming wave, to fill the room.

Fitzroy had spread out the mats and cushions in the middle of the room, under the great windows. Though the items were all things he’d acquired in Gorjo City, the effect was subtly foreign. Perhaps it was the wine bottle, or the way he was lounging on one elbow, or the starlight pouring in through the windows.

The windows faced south, and the golden star he couldn’t name shone brightly, high in the sky.

There was the star above them and the house below, and the glass fishing floats Saya Dorn had collected gleaming and chiming in a circle all around them, like a visual representation of the magic circle of protection Fitzroy had drawn around them on their first night to the star-island.

The fishing floats gleamed and chimed softly as they moved in a wind from the window

There were lights on in their house. “Those are clever,” Fitzroy said happily, perking up as he looked in the window at one. “Set to glow as the daylight goes.”

Enchanted cooktop

the upper door on the balcony not banging but swinging quietly shut.

a chair Cliopher hadn’t seen before was settled into a comfortable-looking nook under the stairs, with a good view of the courtyard entrance and the dock.

the items now spilling out of the sitting room and into the dining room.

There were chairs—actual chairs, with finely curved backs and seats made of ruddy brazilwood—and a beautiful ebony table—and mats of every quality from the most utilitarian to the sort that must have been made by the greatest weavers in the city. There were baskets, and wooden bowls, and a whole stack of firewood in an elaborate wrought-iron and bronze stand. There seemed to be clothes, and there were more cushions, and there were no less than three bookcases, and …“There’s so much,”Cliopher said, walking forward. The fire-pot of daylight illuminated the space with its comforting, warm light. It sat on a new table beside the brazier, which had gone out. There was another item on the table: a bilum made of fibres dyed midnight and fire-red and bronze.

The windows were open wide, and though the wind was gentle— the fishing floats were chiming softly— he could hear the sounds of the market in Zaviya Square drifting up.

opened the balcony door. Before he got to the bottom of the stairs, he discovered that Ludvic— fully dressed, his hair still damp from a bath—had already been out and come back, for he came out of the kitchen with a clay pitcher of coffee in one hand and a paper bag of pastries in the other.

She put it in the oven, nodded at something else that was already baking, and fiddled with the vents. “I love this oven. So old-fashioned but such good work. Imported, of course …no one does this kind of ironwork here, let alone the enchantments.”

Ludvic was in the sitting room, —And there was a shadow flitting across the room, and a whisper and rustle of wings, and a black crow dove through the wind-eye above the brazier

let himself out the front gate of the courtyard,

He smiled, looking up at the windows of Fitzroy’s solarium, which were catching the faint peachy and lavender and dove-grey tints of dawn.

courtyard stones, the iguana stretched out in the sun beside her