Imagining a City, by Kari Sperring

(View entire post here)

Imagine a city. Close your eyes, stretch out your arms, spread your fingertips. What can you smell? Hear? What does the air taste like? Every city is different, every city has its very own DNA. Cambridge (England) where I live now, is the click-click-whirr of bicycle wheels and the grind of aircraft engine testing, the smell of clean stone and institutional cooking. Its air strikes chill in winter, as winds come to rest over it from the distant ice of the Urals: in the summer the dust is full of drying leaves and grass. In the early 1990s, I lived in Dublin, with the hum of traffic travelling wide straight streets and the heady yeast smell of the Guinness brewery and the backdrop of the wind, so constant that once, when it dropped, the sudden silence woke me.

The first thing I knew about Merafi, the city where Living With Ghosts is set, was the feel of its air. It was a brush along my fingertips, a touch on skin and bone, a softness, faintly gritty, faintly sweet. It blew past me, cottony and misted, carrying upon it the faint brown, brackish scent of river water, the dull cold of damp, a hint over all of honeysuckle. As it wound around me, as I listened to it and touched it, it opened out, gave glimpses of what lay beyond and within it. Here it carried the tolling of bells, there a rumble of wooden wheels; here the voices of a market-place, there the clatter of boot-soles on cobbles. It was an old city, then, and a busy one. It was crowded and busy and pre-occupied. As I wandered out into its streets, it ignored me, intent on its own business.

It lies on a river, amidst a river, spreading itself over two banks and many islands, built where the waters run deep and navigable, not far upstream from an estuary. Docks and wharves built themselves a district, bustling and noisome, filled with warehouses and heavy carts, counting houses and customs' posts and cheap taverns. On one side, this city was bounded by marsh. I added a faint brackishness to the air and a long untidy straggle of leant-to shacks, clinging onto the muddy edges. A city with divisions, then, and inequalities, where the very poor lived on the margins and were disdained. Their streets - alleys - were mud and straw and rotting vegetation. The cobbles I had heard must be elsewhere. Out from the river, on the islands, on the banks behind and above the docks, houses and shop fronts grew, the older ones crooked and aslant, leaning out over the streets, made of wood and plaster. Their rooms were dark and poky, cramped and noisy, the preserve of clerks and shop workers and small businesses. By day, their overhangs are full of booths selling books and cloth, braid and ink. Side-streets specialise in bakeries and cook-shops, clock-makers and jewellers and hatters. By night, the streets are home to the sellers of other wares, drink and companionship. In an inn somewhere in this part of Merafi, one of my protagonists lives, in a room in an elderly, resigned sort of inn, plying his particular trades of prostitution and espionage.

I had seen him: he was one of the first characters I glimpsed when the air parted. His companion came from another social order altogether, grander and more proud. Above the islands with their cluster of merchants and workers, respectable and others, on the drier of the two banks, a cliff rises, gently at first, slowly growing steeper. Houses climb along it, wide and airy, with stable-yards and courtyards, mews and small gardens, the town residences of the rich. Beyond them, behind them, set back from the cliff a great private park spreads out, walled in and guarded, with, at its core, the palace of the rulers of this place. With each step, each new street, the city grew, and my characters moved in. As I wrote, I followed them, learning new districts and new activities - guilds that own bridges and temples which are more for show than worship, the warm walls of merchants' townhouses and the stern lines of guard-posts and barracks. The city came first with its smells and sounds and sights, with the characters who knew it, and, in their wake, its story.

Kari Sperring, Living With Ghosts, fantasy, DAW Books, Penguin Books