☙ Lou's Website ❧

A cold wind blew on the last day of Erinna. It came shrieking over the high encircling mountains which were that city’s bulwark against the lands beyond [don't use that word twice!] and descended upon the white walls beyond which it had been rendered inviolate for a thousand years of bliss. In the depths of the city’s winding passages, its stone warrens and crowded alleys, the air was hot and a little stifling; ladies flocked to courtyard fountains and priestesses lay upon tiled floors in the cool darkness of their temples. 

No enemies massed in the green vale which the hill of the city crowned, and a thick haze hung indolently over its thin sparkling streams.

Out of that haze a herald rode; he came from the broad and well paved Way of Symmetry and passed through three gates of increasing splendour, raised for him by pleasant and inattentive guardsmen; he was plunged into the darkness of the city’s lower, now-superseded districts, and ascended a dozen [winding passages] to the broad sparkling thoroughfares of the current High Quarter; he passed by the foundations now being laid for a new level of the city, higher and more glorious than any previous, and was shown into the chamber of the Queen.

Erinna (for all the city’s rulers, loving it, took its name) kept counsel in a five-sided chamber open to all sides, from which once could be surveyed all the outlying valley, verily [do we need a verily???] unto the encircling mountains themselves; now was seen a great honeycomb of marble and sandstone, the windows and balconies of fine buildings on which the observer admiringly gazed, and with little natural light permitted to descend, the chamber was very dark. Countless candles lit Her Majesty’s blueprints.<-change

On the herald’s admittance by her steward Erinna was delighted, for, as she said, the city’s brilliance was best comprehended from without, and outsiders were now few. ‘All the vast heavens bow to Erinna,’ she concluded, smiling beneficently. For the plans before her realised the aphorism: a new line of fortifications, encompassing stades of the Way which now passed through several stages of squandered valley, to take the place of the city’s outer walls. Erinna’s hands grasping fallow land – in a hundred years, when the city again longed to broaden, new walls reaching even further – even the mountains themselves as the boundaries of the city – a great network of eaves and spires from peak to peak! Erinna the eternal, Erinna the beautiful!

The herald agreed that the city was indeed beautiful. And he advised the queen that his master even now was intent upon its destruction, and was massing a great dark host at the passage from which the encircling mountains were attained, having paused there only so that the preparations might be made unseen.

‘What – Erinna under siege!’ cried the queen. ‘Erinna queen of cities, in whose bowels are storehouses to feed ten thousand men, barracks to furnish ten thousand soldiers!’

‘Maybe that is so,’ said the herald. ‘But I fear you mistake me, for my master does not intend a siege; he means no harm to the people of Erinna, and I daresay will not starve them out so as to take the city for himself. It is the city he hates.’ And he explained, as he had himself seen, the machines which were being assembled by the artificers of a dozen kingdoms, and the admixture of substances which might dissolve [marble and sandstone]<-(phrase used already), and the cauldrons transporting fire for use in the old quarters of the city where wood had been employed, before the vale was cleared of wood.

‘To intend such mischief!’ exclaimed the queen, whose imagination promised minor setbacks in her current building programs and a few toppled pavilions. [Picturing] an Erinna that was not, grasslands where Erinna once stood, was very difficult. She summoned her generals, informing them that some attack or other was promised, and summoned also her masters of coin, should the enemy be (as they seemed) willing to be paid off and leave in peace. But the generals had fought no wars in a thousand years of bliss and were unsure how to begin, and the coffers were running low, with the vale despoiled and the import of building materials grown costly.

As these things were being arranged a messenger arrived from the highest point of the city and bid the queen and her counsel come. They left the flickering chamber and passed by many passages – secrets of royal privilege, constructed in many cases within the walls and foundations of many-tiered structures, and operable only by the queen’s seal – and entered upon the battlements just as a [shock] of brilliant sun emerged from the silvery haze of the day; the herald who had come from the horsemen followed, knowing already what would be seen.

The vale had grown dark: from the pass, [as could now be seen], streamed a mass of folk, disorderly at the first, but forming swiftly into their lines as they broke upon the open plain, and amongst their ranks were the most terrible machines of war that have ever been seen in this land: rams and ballistae, and among them towers equal in height if not in loveliness to any of Erinna. The promised fires were lit, and bilious smoke filled the valley.

At the head of this host on a white horse was that master who was said to hate Erinna.

‘What a terrible war it will be,’ mused the queen, and she began summoning pages and scribes to relay whatever plan her generals devised for the city’s defence. But the herald of the enemy, who had remained with the observers on the battlements [[[as they strived to comprehend their current position]]]<-hate this, drew Erinna aside and spoke to her in a low voice.

‘My lady,’ he said, ‘your generals have been ornaments all the years of your reign and cannot comprehend the gravity of your plight. My master’s armies, honed all these years of raiding, shall overwhelm you utterly. This much he charged me to deliver in my message, but in his words I divined a stratagem by which all your people might be saved.’

‘Well, speak,’ said the queen.

‘Abandon this city at once, my lady, and convey its population by means of the concealed [means of escape] which are known to pass beyond the mountains and into other lands. My master will be relieved to have the prospect of violence [removed], for he is not cruel, and your people have done him no harm. But he hates Erinna.’

‘Abandon Erinna. To think! Abandon Erinna!’ And the queen would hear no more from this envoy of her enemy, but had him cast from the gates.

And that was the last day of Erinna. No more is known of what went on in the city, for he from whom we have all we were told was there no longer. It was said that for many years after a smouldering heap yet showed where Erinna once stood, and where its towers had been cast down, and its stones turned to slime, and where its thousand of folk still lie, but I have gone there, and seen only long grasses, and smelled wildflowers, and guessed at what may be a dense thicket of trees in another hundred years.

But there is also said this, though it is not known from whom: that until the last the queen Erinna abided in her dark chamber, its low ceiling foul with the smoke of her candles, and would not leave her city, nor alert its peoples, but say only: ‘It is wrong that he should hate Erinna, beautiful Erinna.’