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They say that in the deepest matters of the Bazaar, one should always look to love. Whether trading there or doing business within his own establishment, there is one thing the Manager of the Royal Bethlehem Hotel will never forget: his lover's face. He cannot. It's on every coin.
They say there is a Screaming Map that will show you the way to Polythreme. They usually add, "Don't go." The Manager does not go to Polythreme. He has his reasons.
He has a hundred reasons.
So he sends you.
It starts with a summons. The Manager of the Royal Bethlehem Hotel has a task for you. It would be a kindness if you would do this small thing for him, he says. It is merely a matter of delivering a message to a distant place. And isn't it said that sea-voyages can be a tonic for spirit and senses alike? It will be good for you. In more ways than one: there will be gratitude in it for you, and a case of Black Wings absinthe, and some of the more recondite volumes you have been longing for chance to bring your way. He will speak favourably of you to a few of his contacts in the world of incunabulae. He smiles that smile he uses when he expects something. You think of rumours you have heard. Perhaps they are true; there is something of an expectation of command, of being obeyed, that lives in that smile.
He hands you a beautifully tooled messenger's case, saying, "Open it after you arrive." Then he gives you something flat and rectangular, wrapped in a scrap of puzzle-damask. You unwrap it and find a ticket to Polythreme.
The voyage holds the usual perils: monsters of the Unterzee, islands of coral, things that shriek in the fog. You make reasonably good time, all things considered.
Once you arrive in Polythreme and find secure and private lodgings, you open the case. Inside is a piece of parchment. Here in glittering dark ink and the distinctive hand of the Manager are your instructions.
Gain an audience with the King with a Hundred Hearts. It will not be easy. Once you manage it, there is a boon I would have you beg of him, in which this paper will instruct you. But first you must understand well the importance of what I ask, in order to be a suitable emissary.
There are indeed instructions, framed by a tale. It is more of the Manager's own history than you have ever heard before. You cannot help but feel that the knowledge is meant to be part of your payment for this commission.
The words soak into your mind. You hear them whispering there as you open the copper gates and step into the formal garden around the villa that belongs to the King with a Hundred Hearts. You are led within by statues, brought down the path, shown things by the King with a Hundred Hearts. You are coming to realize that the King not only is the disembodied voice you hear but also inhabits these statues: fantastically carved statues that now show you his history in tableaux.
The King with a Hundred Hearts used to have another name, when he traveled the East. He came to my temple, of course. He was so beautiful.
The voice says, "I came to him in the Temple of Eyes. We became lovers. It seemed inevitable. He had a city. The Crossroads Shaded by Cedars, they called it." The statues arrange themselves, show you the scene.
The man who became King with a Hundred Hearts is indeed beautiful in his silks. The man gazing at him openmouthed with desire wears white linen, and many layers of shining copper and brass jewellery, and a hungry look.
I was the priest-king of the First City. I loved my city and serving it was my life. But I gave it all up for him. Literally. He was dying. I traded the First City to the Masters of the Bazaar in exchange for his life. And now he refuses to see me. I would do anything for him, give up anything for him. No one can question this. I have already done so once.
The path leads into a cave and you follow. You see the exchange transpire in the underground chamber, watch the Manager, or he who will be the Manager, bargaining with the Masters of the Bazaar in their many-petalled black cloaks.
"He will tell you how he loved the First City, how he served it," says the voice. "Yet what he will not tell you is this: it was about control. He needed to know everything that transpired, every coming and going, every bit of trade. He fed upon the knowledge and the power the knowledge gave him. It was thus he honed the skills that let him bargain with the Masters."
The voice is unutterably sad.
Since he will not let me love him directly, I must find other things to prove my love. In the meantime, I watch over things. I have always needed something to serve, to look after. For now, I have the Hotel. I watch over the people within, especially the mad. The mad have their own knowledge, you know. Most fascinating, really. Valuable, even.
You follow deeper into the cavern. At last you come to a statue: a handsome man of the Orient. The traveller. The King with a Hundred Hearts.
"Everything he did, he had a good reason for," says the voice you have been hearing, coming now from the statue before you. "And everything he did funneled more power to him, more control. By the time he made the bargain that saved my life, he had reached the pinnacle of possible control. It was not hard for him to give up the First City. He had sucked the life out of it."
The mad do need looking after, of course -- but they bring such life to the Hotel! And, of course, there is the trade. I do what I can to facilitate things, provide place and time and privacy. And for such facilitation, should I not accept a few tokens of thanks? Should I not dip my cup now and then in the stream of trade that flows so vigorously through the place I watch over? Shall I not watch over this city, and care for it, since I find myself here in the meantime, even though it is not my own?
The King, in this particular manifestation at least, is finer-featured than his Clay Men progeny, and made from marble. He motions you to sit with him on a pile of cushions. He speaks with distant note in his voice, the dust of long-withered tenderness. "And when I became what I am, when they brought me to Polythreme and broke me and put a diamond in me, I saw even more clearly. I saw what he is."
They depend on me, of course. And they, in turn, take care of me. I care for them. In both senses. They are as dear to me, some of them, as parts of myself.
"My lover saved me, in a manner of speaking. My fits would have killed me, so he bargained that we should both endure the ages, in return for his city. But the Bazaar isn't kind. Look what it did to me." He gestures with a white marble arm. "The Masters took a diamond from the great glowing mountain in the South and gave it to me for a heart. They made me like this."
He is silent for a few moments. "The diamond that is my heart shattered long ago. A speck of diamond dust is in each of my children. They are parts of myself. Each walkway, each fountain, each building of Polythreme that bears one of my hundred hearts is me. I am a city now. I will not be his city."
And if he will not love me, if he cannot soften his adamant heart, well. I will, nevertheless, continue to give my all for him, for only he is worthy of my love. For him will I tap the flow of trade, gather the nightmares of the mad, raid the dreams of the desperate. For him will I acquire the honey, the absinthe, the countless things with which to buy or bribe or bring under my influence … what? An army? Yes. For him I would have stormed heaven, once. The gods would not hear my pleas. The Masters of the Bazaar answered instead. What they did for me -- for him! -- displeased him, and he visits his displeasure on me by turning away.
"I will never be his city. Also, I am changing. The Clay Men. There are more and more. I am a city becoming a people. I am a man without a heart who became a King with a Hundred Hearts, who became a city, who is becoming a people. How can I, who am learning what it is to be alive, learning to resurrect myself from dust and stone and copper, learning to form myself from clay and put in one tiny bright star of that shared light which is life… how could I ever go back to being his? Even if I wished it for myself, how could I bring all who I am now under his yoke?"
I would have stormed heaven once for him. I will storm the Neath for him now. I will build up the machineries of a most secret and ingenious war, the intricate machineries with which I will storm the refuge of the Masters of the Bazaar. I will make war upon them. And I will win.
"Even when he saw me that first time, even as I saw him see me, even as the veil of love descended upon my eyes, I knew then what he was like. I knew, but I traded that knowledge for love. I made my bargain and averted my eyes. And for a while, it was enough."
The Masters bargain in bad faith. They cheated me. They took what was mine. They cost me my love! They cost me my heart.
"For a while, it was enough. But death ends all bargains, they say, and when the fell sickness came upon me I passed close enough to death that it counted. The shadow of the great gate covered me. There was no part of me that was not overshadowed by death. The bargain I had made with myself, the one where I paid with willingness-to-not-know for the love I thought I needed, that bargain unravelled even as the Masters changed me to what I am now."
But I will hold them to their bargain, even though they did not hold themselves to it. I will make them give full measure to my satisfaction. I will crush them utterly, and by so doing, I will make my love love me again. The Masters stole my love from me. When I triumph, the Masters will give him back.
"The Masters gave my life back to me, though they took my heart and put in hard diamond instead. Yet now, as I have no heart, I cannot foolishly trade for love again. So there is that. It was my curse, this loss: my sharp-edged gift from the Masters, given to wound and destroy -- and I bless it."
Take these letters and these gifts. Go to Polythreme. Tell him I work for our revenge. Tell him that though I know and accept that he no longer loves me, I am still utterly his. I have given myself to our cause completely. Tell him I will do whatever it takes, that if he releases me from my promise I shall play the Marvellous, stake everything I have to obtain what we must have to prosecute our grievance against the Masters in the strongest possible fashion. Tell him I dedicate it all to him.
"Tell him that I release him from his promise. He may play the Marvellous. But do not let him win. It is not only that I could never give myself to him again -- for I could not; I belong to myself now, in all my hundred parts and more, for Polythreme belongs to itself and I will never be his city -- but that such a loss is my only freedom. Such a loss will keep him where he is, scheming and gathering, telling himself it is all for love of the city that should be his, for love of the lover that should not have escaped him. He'll have what he wants, and never know it. He tells himself he wants me. What his heart wants is the gathering of power, and always was."
Tell him that though I have but one heart, it is broken beyond repair as long as I have not him.
"One day he will face himself in one of the mirrors, and see the truth of what he loves, and accept it. On that day, he will cease to fight the Masters of the Bazaar, and take his place among them. But speak not of that to him. Only say that yes, I release him from his promise. He may play the Marvellous."
The voice of the statue trails off to silence and dust. The path is long, and the statues along it watch you as you go. Dockside, the copper mooring posts wail as you board your ship to carry the answer back across the seas to the Manager of the Royal Bethlehem Hotel. You think on cities, and love, and bargains, as the song of Polythreme rises around you.
In the deepest matters of the Bazaar, always look to love.