Eden’s Flowers-

 enaissance

                 Chapter 2: Anderwelt

 

* * * * *

 

 

 

As a matter of taste, new slaves were to be tamed and broken beneath ground.

 

            Their screamed or silent torments were kept away from the majority of the visiting public, who saw only the glitter of cultivation and expense, while in the cavernous dungeons of the Rose, a dark and torch-lit subculture of pain flourished endlessly.

           

            The lord of the Rose had very particular standards.

            Slaves were not human beings. They were not individuals of any race. Biologically, they could be any species under the sun; but in the Rose they had only one state of nature. First and foremost, they were slaves- they had no independence, ambition, dignity, freedom, or future. In order for an individual to become a slave, these things had to be removed, and so, like surgeons, the Rose delicately and precisely bled them away. New arrivals were picked and prodded, burned and whipped, incised and branded, restrained and tortured in order to purge the slag from the refined product.

A perfect slave was one that needed shackles only as a formality; even if they were paid to leave, they wouldn't know where else to go, or what to do.

 

That was the ideal that Auradre worked towards. Every week, the master of the Rose made it a point to free himself from his smoke-filled office and the endless procession of barbed social occasions and come down to the caverns himself in order to survey production. This week, he was disappointed and irritated by the results.

 

            “Sire, milord, apologies milord… it’s the new one. The latest import. Uncooperative again, sire…” the man flinched and fawned. "To my greatest mortification I assure you, sire."

 

            The overseer who had spoken was a deceptively formal and dainty man, cynically dubbed "The Headmaster. He was plumpish, though not fat, with skinny legs, and wore only whatever was at the height of fashion. Lace was stuffed under his chin to the point where he had to look down his nose in order to see people. His hands beneath their gold kid leather gloves were white and doughy, the pride of the aristocracy. His flaxen hair was his vanity, and he curled it every morning around heated metal rods.  His face was round and child-like, though his eyes were small, watery, and squinty and left people with a generally mean and ultimately accurate impression of him. Beneath the soft and powdered flesh were tight sinews and an obscene sort of strength brought on by arrogance and a short temper. His suffocating softness was grotesque, as it barely covered the brutality that lay beneath it.

 

            Auradre clicked his teeth around the end of a long rosewood pipe, inhaling bitterly. He took a long, long time to breathe out the thin plume of smoke.

 

            “After a month.” He spoke from the shadows of the stairway. “After a month, he’s still kicking. I’m surprised.”  His was voice soft, clipped, feminine, pointedly accented. It ran with a peculiar undercurrent like sandpaper from years of breathing in the smoldering fumes from acrid barks and spiced leaves.

            “You are irresponsible, Benoit. Trashy. I could call this shoddy workmanship. I could say, I am not paying you for such a waste of time.”

 

The overseer avoided his master's eyes. “Indeed, sire.”

 

"The Sisterhood's donations are usually of the most superior quality- hardly any trouble at all." Auradre breathed.  "I find it difficult to believe that he's still resisting."

 

"Indeed, sire. I have taken the liberty of reassigning him to Lady Alyolna for the time being, milord, to improve his manners."

 

"This will resolve the dilemma shortly, I trust?"

 

"Oh, indubitably, milord. Unquestionably. The Lady is most talented."

 

And so she was.

 

Several subterranean floors removed from the entrance of the dungeon, past the holding cells and the isolated solitary chambers, lay a closed iron crescent of cage bars encircling an arena. The floor was stained with old blood and oil, the color of rust. Though shackles lined the walls, only two occupied the arena- figures facing each other in a slow, seething dance.

One was curvaceous, strong, and belonged the Lady Alyolna; while the other, crouched and coiled, belonged to an enormous black panther.

 

The cat was pacing across from her dangerously, its molten eyes dripping malice and fear.

 

            The torchlight illuminated the darkness enough to turn the deep blacks into purples and the glints on metal and hair into auburn gold.

            The Lady Alyolna was a practical woman. She wore a practical, hard-leather outfit the color of pitch. It was tight fitting so as not to restrict her movements, protective as a good armor should be, black so it would show no bloodstains, and was easily washable. She carried a practical, nine-tailed whip with metal spurs adorning its braids. Her hair was tied back in a practical knot with her bangs left to hang over her face. She wore no jewelry except for studded silver rings on each middle finger. Any other accessories would have been impractical, which was not what the Lady wished.

            She was a practical woman- aside from this, she was exceptionally beautiful, and enjoyed inflicting pain.

 

Idly, she flicked the tails of her whip, making the ends clink together ominously. In her experience, understatement was often the most effective form of exaggeration.

Alyolna's job was to hurt things professionally. She was quite good at it.

 

            -But not quite good enough.

           

The cat had been whipped before, and Sisters had tied hooks to theirs.  He'd been whipped- so long and hard that he had taught himself not to scream. This was nothing.

In fact, the weapon was not what made him bare his fangs from a distance at all.

 

            "Mangy cat." Smiled the lady. "No one would want you for anything but a rug." Her voice was honey and lead, falling in heavy saccharine drops.

 

            In the darting, mirrored globes of the panther’s eyes, her full hips began to take on the same motion, the same swing as a cat's pendulum stride.  Memory overlapped reality: she was a young pantheress in her prime, glossy black fur washed smooth and powdered with silver dust. She undulated toward him, entrancing and dangerous and impatient- he had belonged to her, and others. In his mind it was she who had held him before a black altar and shed his blood. She who had chained him above an audience and shaved off his coat, who had bred him by force like a mere animal; she who had punished, sedated, beaten, abused, humiliated, and raped… until nothing in the world was more hateful to him than the female creature, cat or no.

            There was no way a human woman could be part of the Sisterhood, but it was the same viciousness in her that made her lick her lips and swing her flail with a slow eagerness, and the same hatred that rose in his gorge when he looked at her.

 

            His growl was laced with the bitterness of ten year's servitude.

"Skin me then. You wouldn't go through so much trouble if that’s all you wanted."

 

            "I'll certainly discuss that option with my master the next time we confer." Said Alyolna coolly.

 

            Uncoiling, the great cat sprung from his crouch, eliminating the distance between them in an eye blink. The lady raised her leather bound arm for protection, but there was no need: A sharp electric crackle shattered the darkness into a thousand blue-white pieces, and the cat howled, falling from the air, twisting in agony.

 

            He landed heavily on his side, feline grace overcome. Dull, tingling pain pulsed from around the heavy collar encircling his neck.

           

            This was the signature bond of the Rose, the other thing that ensured its product's cooperation besides good training. He scratched at the device fruitlessly with a hand-like paw. There was no way for it to come off without first removing his head.

 

            The Lady Alyolna chucked softly with amusement.

"That's the first thing everybody tries. If I didn’t’ know better, I’d say you didn’t trust our engineering."

 

Her arm moved swiftly, new blood striping across the already-stained floor.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

            In Notundag, the stamp of Lord Mirka Auradre was as good as a king's crest or a full purse. Syster discovered that he could forgo stumbling over formalities and procedures simply by producing the signed letter and confirming that he was in fact its rightful owner. Soon, he left off speaking altogether.

The city opened for him like a flower.

 

            "Any servant of Auradre's is a friend of ours."

 

            "No vassal of the Rose pays in my shop."

 

            "If sir had been a tourist then I would say he could not afford it- but, for you it is a gift!"

 

            -And so on, until Syster had acquired all the supplies and clothing he felt he needed, without spending more than three gold falcons and a silver dovett.

It was nearly intoxicating, being able to pay for anything he needed. Anything he wanted. It made him feel wary, even guilty, as if someone would jump out at him and tell him that he had to give it all back.

 

            Syster's new cloak was a thick, waterproofed affair he thought might be seal pelt. He purchased new leggings, a clean shirt, and even a neck scarf, which he had not had a budget for since he left home. The artist, now considerably warmer and more heavily burdened, tugged his new supplies back into the Rose's coach, and set off once more towards his destination.

 

            “What sort of m-man is Mirka Auradre?” he had asked his coachman timidly.

 

“Rich” was the reply, and no one else seemed to have any better idea than that.

 

            Syster had met the rich before. Noblemen of all temperaments had populated the roads and the cities he had passed through before he came to the sea and the galley. He had even found patrons amongst them from time to time. He had seen what the rich wore, and heard how they spoke. He had seen their fine carriages and their impractically large houses. He had eaten their food, accepted their money, painted their pale, elegant faces on canvas and on wood. Curiously, the artist had never been one to question why some men- some ordinary men, came to have so much when he had so little. If anyone had asked, he would have said calmly that they had simply been born into a different world than he had.

            The nobility encountered different problems and adversities, that he, Syster, would never know, just as the rich would seldom trespass on the toil or hardship of the poor. Similarly, the wealthy enjoyed pleasures and encountered a different kind of beauty than that of a rural peasant; but it was just that: A different kind of beauty- not the only kind.

           

            As far as Syster was concerned, the rich had always been rich and the poor had always been poor, and there was something to be cherished about both worlds. Indeed, there was something to be cherished about ALL walks and stations of life. You could find beauty anywhere, even when one was starving.

           

            However, Syster appreciated world of the elite; it was, after all, the class that had the time and money to perpetuate and value his livelihood. He enjoyed the refinement of taste that the upper tier of society offered. He liked the importance they placed on beauty and nuance. It was a lifestyle that a farmer or a laborer simply didn’t have the luxury of cultivating.

            Among the rich, Syster was understood- he need not ever be a part of their society, or clink wineglasses with their numbers; he was an artist- his passion was what their entire universe pivoted on. They had the education, the culture, the whimsy, the imagination to appreciate the powers that moved in him. It was something that his own family had never understood; why a paintbrush should be more important to him than a plough.

           

            In any case it was the rich that would employ him now, not the land and soil. He would provide them with beauty, and they, in turn, would allow him to live amongst the beautiful. They would make him free. This is what Syster thought of the rich.

           

            He would not envy them their high and glittering world; he would enhance it, live alongside it. He understood the essential superficiality, the critical uselessness, the paradoxes, the contradictions, the form, the function, the fire and pulse and fever of Art better than they ever would. It was more his than theirs, in a way.

 

            This is what he thought, as the carriage pulled beyond the gates of The Rose.

 

And then he began to understand.

 

 

 

* * * * *

 

            The Rose had been a cathedral once.

 

            Its architects had built it on primeval land in the shape of the cross, with a high-lofting dome at its crux and an alter facing the east, in the way that cathedrals had been built on the old Earth; though the east was not the same east, and the flock was not the same flock that had once shared a covenant with their fearsome, jealous god.

             But the stones were blessed all the same from the seat of the Sacred Order in the new Holy Land, an infant so ancient now that it could not remember ever having had a predecessor, as indeed, few in living memory could.

            Wars had been fought, won, and lost, and gradually the earth had taken back what now-forgotten men had once built as a house of the lord.

 

            The Rose had seen centuries of traders, smugglers and refugees take shelter in its crumbling vaults. It had survived a great plague, a second holy war, and the final, bloody exodus of malcontents and heretics from the Highlands and the Main- when suddenly the Rose found itself on borderless, unconsecrated ground; beyond the reach of sacred powers and with no recognizable form of government save what poetic justice and the coin of rich exiles could enforce.

           

            During the time of the Reclamation the Rose discovered its high ceilings and thick walls made an ideal fortress, its cloisters doubling as battlements. The stones that had been blessed by the church now repelled their every advance, and with time the old cathedral was abandoned to the triumphant dead. 

           

            A new age dawned; the wealthy became educated and the educated grew ambitious. The sons of persecuted heretics saw opportunity beckon from the borderless territory and sought to exploit it. All those who had something to flee came to the free shores of the frontier and set up business.

            The Rose gradually fell into disrepair after serving to protect its rebellious new breed of children. It lay fallow for many years, too large to effectively repair and too fondly remembered to deconstruct.

           

            In that era, a different sort of wanderer appeared on the Rose’s shores; one whose people lived in the shadow of no nation and no god, who had fled not only the church, but the feudal nations it promoted.

            The Free People, they called themselves. They were small in number, and fierce, and wild, and beautiful. They lived together, apart from the other exiles, bringing with them strange customs and lettered stories. They spoke their own language, ate their own food, refused to do commerce with the people of the land.

           

            It was many years before one of their number departed his tribe and his family and moved into the world of trade and coin, and many years after that before he rose like a shining star among the nobility, appearing out of nowhere with a fortune so vast it bordered on the fantastical.

Within the year he had claimed the old cathedral, and styled himself lord of the Rose.

 

            The cathedral was transformed- stones were polished and cased in fine marble, new wings were added, towers built, balconies constructed, and vast windows restored; stylish ornamentation chiseled and molded onto the walls, angels and goddesses sculpted in gold and ivory nestled in alcoves, glass atriums raised where fields had lain; vineyards were planted, fountains erected, and foreign wood and stone imported at great expense. Tile and gilding replaced moldy rafters and rusted iron. The Rose was rebuilt in the image of the times on the backs of prisoners and the enslaved: lush and extravagant and presumptuous, a home for erudite rebels and elitist criminals.            

            In many ways, it remained a house of worship- but the nature of the service changed from the pious to the hedonistic, its reins passed from one generation of the thrice-exiled foreigners to the next as the far-away Sacred Orders growled and pawed at their borders.

 

            The sort of wealth that the Rose embodied was not of the variety that could be gleaned naturally by honest means. It was not even the sort that could be amassed via corrupt political means; this was the sort of wealth that tyrants and god-kings dreamt of, and it was anyone’s guess as to how the first of Mirka Auradre’s clan had come to inherit it.

 

            The vast family fortune of Auradre’s ancestors had gradually been depleted over the years, though the Rose was well recognized as the hub of the free land’s economy. It was a business now, not a force of nature, and it was an establishment that required a great deal of upkeep and renewal.

            Times change, and the Rose liked to change with them. The gladiatorial ring had never gone out of style, nor had the bathhouse or the rookery, but the vomitorium had been replaced by a more modern water closet and the hedge maze was a new addition. The gold Venuses and the old portraits were occasionally sold to those with the interest and the means to obtain them, and new art was circulated in on a regular basis, but the Rose remained a glutton for art.

             Much of Notundag’s form and function was covered by the establishment as well, making certain that the city kept up with the pearl at its center. It also covered the costs of the water way and the coach network that spread outward from the stables to the docks and all the way into the outlying hills and the manors of the aristocracy.

 

            It was in one of these coaches that Syster was being ferried bumpily beneath the gates of the Rose, and through the coach’s window that he caught the first glimpse of its monumental exterior.

           

            The eastern entrance to the Rose remembered the aesthetic of being the first cathedral in the free lands; it towered above the flickering lives of men with the same force of presence and grandeur that had made the god-fearing tremble and look to Heaven for mercy. The original façade was buttressed, massive, still bedecked with saints and angels, and above the mighty doors blossomed a rose window of stained glass so awesome and vast that it had taken two lifetimes to construct.

             It was for this window that the Rose had been named, and it was to this glowing, blooded ruby that Syster looked now in a state of panic and ecstasy so gripping that it denied him breath and thought.

 

            Syster stepped out of the coach, feeling at once small and very heavy with his oversized bag of pigments and tools. There were men and women coming to and from the Rose’s open doors, evidently more acclimatized to the gravity of their surroundings than he. The artist felt like he was in a painting in which the perspective had been badly miscalculated, so that the scale of his surroundings effectively dwarfed the figures in the foreground, making them faceless and unidentifiable.

           

            He shivered. The place he had entered was built for titans and gods, not humanity- how could the men and women scurrying about before its massive feet not be aware of its power, its majesty? Would he ever become so accustomed to this sight?

            -No. No, it was not possible. He could never be so disaffected. They were shallow creatures, trapped in their little minds, unable to grasp the magnitude of this… beautiful monster they were a part of.

 

            The rain ceased, light as feathers, and the setting sun shot a ray of light through the blue-misted haze which flamed upon the exact center of the kaleidoscope window.

 

            Syster choked, blinked, and began to cry.

 

 

* * * * *

 

“Kam ye dun frae tenz mit e?

            Sellen dae doe fran ey sae klayr.

            Oer dae hoc una brae del grayn

            Ael frae Sunner’s hae mit e.

            Freyd-ey dey n’ hae mit e.”

 

            Lord Auradre did not have a good singing voice, but the song was relatively unharmed. It was an old song, and it had survived rougher, more drunken voices than his. It was a love song, though he doubted anyone but him could make sense of the words anymore. He let the rusty notes drift out the high slatted window along with a cloud of his pipe smoke. The master of the Rose was reclining with his knees up on a pillowed divan, watching a miniature figure in the courtyard below, an ant from this height, conspicuously motionless amongst his bustling fellows.

           

            “Dunia. Who is that fellow who just arrived on our doorstep?” he asked languidly. “He’s been standing there for ten minutes now like a bird in a snake eye. Are we expecting anyone… significant?” A plume of smoke spiraled between his lips.

 

            The woman he had addressed was busy playing cards at a low rosewood table, half-dressed and looking artistically disheveled. She had thick red hair that draped over one eye like a curtain and bobbed in artificial curls at her back.

           

“I have no idea. Did you invite someone?” she slapped a card onto the table absently, looking for its matching suit.

 

            “I don’t remember…” Auradre croaked, a lilt of unconcern mixing with faint annoyance. “Go find out for me.”

            The woman raised a baleful hazel eye to him petulantly, set down her cards with a sigh and prepared to get up when a round-faced courier appeared at the door, heels clicking to announce himself.

 

“The new Shorlyisch artist is arrived, milord. Straight from the docks. He’s on his way in now.”

 

            Auradre blinked, tapping his pipe against the window so the ashes floated away in eddies on the wind. Outside, the figure he’d been watching had moved.

He waved a land lazily in the air, disturbing clouds of violet smoke.

 

            “Send him… actually, no. Wait. Keep him there. I’ll come down. This one has come a long way.”

 

            “Another Project Auradre?” chuckled the woman, tucking her feet underneath her thighs and flipping two cards onto a stack. “If you keep employing the unfortunates, there won’t be any left on the streets to cater to.”

 

            “Unfortunates? Like you and your sister, Dunia?” he smiled cattily over his shoulder. The woman pulled a face at him and he laughed huskily.

            “Tell this so young and weary artist arrival that Mirka Auradre will be meeting him in the Amber Room presently.”

 

The courier nodded and left, nimbly dodging another visitor and disappearing down a set of stairs.

 

            The lord of the Rose rolled his head on his neck with a cracking sound and got to his feet. His robe rustled as he drifted around the seated courtesan.

            “Stay here, Dunia. I will join you for a game once I return.”

 

            He wore no shoes, padding silently down the stairs in white slippers bound in gold sashes, singing softly in his sandpaper voice.

            Such strange birds were flying in to his castle these days! At least this one would help pay the bills, he thought, instead of scaring away customers.

 

“Kam far aw’a mit e, swaet brid, Freyd-ey dey n’ hae mit e….”

 

* * * * *

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