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The Pearls That Were His

Eyes

a Tale of Cittàvecchio

By Ian Andrews

Ian Andrews has asserted his right under the Copyrights

Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of

this work.

The passages beginning each chapter quoted from The Waste

First published in the UK in 2008 by

T ATTERDEMALION P RESS

Red Door, 12 Ardencote Road,

Birmingham B13 0RN

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by

way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or

otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in

any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is

published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-4466-4000-5

Typeset in Garamond. Printed and Bound in Great Britain by

Lulu.com

Prologue: Unreal City

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so

many,

I had not thought death had undone so

many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 60-65

The night mists of Cittàvecchio are legendary.

It’s said (by those who live safe and far from the oldest,

waterlogged quarters) that every night the Tattered King

throws his cloak over the ancient and crumbling city, his

constant lover and royal consort. Centuries ago, those

gossips and harpies say, the Old Gods tried and failed to

wash her iniquities away with their great deluge; she

endured, half-drowned, half-dead, knee deep in silt and

floodwater, a sunken shadow of her Imperial past. Half

one thing and half another; astride the divide between

what is and what could have been . Such borderlands are the

places where the eldritch and wondrous can sometimes

slip through the cracks; the place where the realm of the

Tattered King touches our own more mundane world for

good and for ill.

And in his ragged winding-shroud, in the fog that clings

to the water of her flooded streets and mossy canals,

things not wholly of this dull and dreary world

sometimes occur.

The pious call them miracles and gloss over their more

sinister connotations. The old nobility of the Cittàvecchi

are skilled at putting masks on things. Indeed, they are

famous for their masquerades and their carnivals; the

polite diplomacy; the inevitable stiletto clenched in the

iron fist – velvet glove optional, but it had better be of

the most exquisite fashion. Famous, if not infamous, for

the beautiful and terrible history of their drowned and

undying city. And, of course, famous for their elegant

masks.

Old Cittàvecchio, the ancient Imperial capital. Now in

drowned and faded splendour; with its bells and towers

and flooded streets, with its mossy statues and its

mournful cloak of night mist. A city of quiet magic,

unregarded by those inured to the miraculous or

determined not to see it. But for every haughty and

disdainful mask in the salons of the upper city, turning

their back on the traditions and the quiet sorceries of the

city for the new sciences, there is another who

remembers to bow before crossing a bridge and who pays

respect to the spirits of deep water.

If you know where to look, they say (and who are you to

argue with Them?) there is a courtyard where late at

night the statue of a lion in combat with a snake dance in

battle for their own secret amusement. Up a tiny and

disregarded canal there was once a walled garden in

Imperial times; there you can find a small pool where the

Undines come to wash the long weeds of their hair in the

dark of the new moon. And if you scramble over the

right rooftops when that selfsame moon is full, you can

find a walled courtyard with no entrances or exits -

within, silent dancers trapped forever in a slow and

stately measure like the marionettes of the city’s famous

Ian Andrews - The Pearls That Were His Eyes.pdf

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