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several Karintepes managed to feed themselves and keep warm during
Win-ter. The Old Towners spent the snowtime in these ancient rotting buildings
and lived on ... what? Credit? Another way the Goyo wrung wealth from their
world?
Old Town buildings were a congealed mass of ma-sonry, all visible surfaces
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patched and repatched, a pal-impsest of centuries of paint and playbills. Dark
and oozing tunnels wandered off on either side, daunting pas-sages the Old
Towners misnamed streets. And yet ... and yet there was an astonishing
ferment of life on every side, excitement, anger, joy and sorrow, all of it
with an intensity that stirred her blood in ways she hadn t experienced for
thousands of years. It frightened her, this surge of emotion.
##
This street they were on was supposed to be the widest way inside Old Town,
but the heyyil had to creep along, blowing its honking siren to move aside the
strollers, the two-wheeled tiltcarts, the delivery flats and the shills that
choked the artery to a tricklet flowing down the middle. It was almost celled
over by projecting third stories and the fourth stories finished the process
so there was no sunlight in here, only looped cables studded with bare bulbs
(some white, many colored) that crawled over every surface, lights that had
a propensity for fusing suddenly and dangerously as frayed insulation fell
apart and bared the wires to the moisture condensing on the stone and stony
wood.
Around them were strollers and buyers, hawkers, shills and street stalls a
pawnshop, a jeweler s shop according to the guide, his stock was mostly silver
and semi-precious stones, acquiring what value it had from the skill of the
contrivers he bought from. You might pick up some pretty memories in these
shops, the guide said, inexpensive but attractive. There were
cookstalls selling sausage rolls, noodle dishes, tripe, fritteries, soup,
meat pies, hot and cold sandwiches, even full meals all woven into a
tapestry of smells that eddied from point to point, lingered in alcoves, sat
in pockets to surprise with sudden delight as the heyyil whined past. There
were stalls selling wine, paper and incense sticks, a shoemaker he was
sitting out front, finishing a pair of boots as his son shilled for him,
calling out the excell-ence of his work and the minuteness of his prices.
There were stalls selling old clothing, piece goods, iron and copper wares,
clocks and watches, bedding straw, rice, beans, tubers. There was a
teahouse/whorehouse, its murky interior running back into one of the permanent
buildings, its clutch of small square tables scattered across the
walkway, its barkers striding back and forth among them, playing the
crowd to pull in customers, shouting the virtues of the women and
men and oth-ers installed in the cubicles up the stairs at the back.
The Upper Floors, the notorious Upper
Floors. There was a smokeshop, a clogmaker s, a stall selling baskets and
wickerware, another selling books and stationery. Another teashop, a
coffeehouse/restaurant/betting shop, a money changer, a cabinet maker.
There was a tavern/ whorehouse with a trio whose performance became
measurably more sprightly as the heyyil got closer, and twin girls singing a
local brand of counterpoint. There were stalls selling toys, tools, springs
and screws and nails and other such small necessities, spare parts used and
new (more used than new), stalls selling music re-cordings and flakereaders
and other electronic items. There was a gymnasium/whorehouse. There were
stalls selling wires and cables, ropes, plastic pipes, stalls sell-ing used
everything, second hand, third and so on. Stalls crowding one after another,
pushing into the street until there was barely room for the heyyil to glide
past them.
The ancient quarter was filled and overflowing with noise music, men, women
and others talking at a sus-tained shout, laughter, groans, screams,
spiels, the shuf-fle of countless feet, the creak of the rotting,
crumbling buildings, the moan of wind sucked into the holes and
hollows, the streets and corridors, the scratching and scraping of the grit
and rubble it blew with it, the buzzing of the naked bulbs, sputters from
fusing wires, the thou-sand thousand unclassifiable noises from the
sweatshops and the factories a subaudible undercurrent that the old man said
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was a mix of all these, the SOUND Shadith had heard in his recordings,
the SOUND he d dissected and analyzed at paralyzing length, the
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