Silken Cities (After Italo Calvino)
by Cass Lynch
High above the arc of the sky and in the dark cushion of space, the spider goddess Rosa watches over the Silk Continent from her burrow on the moon. The world she created was once broad and green, but it is now cracked and dry, in the painful process of shedding its skin.
Cities and Memory 1
The cloud city of Cataxia is the oldest civilisation on the Silk Continent. When the ground cracked and the Great Drying began, the lush and towering rainforests of the world browned and turned to arid mallee scrub. But not so for Cataxia. Their monastery city sits high up in the Mygal Mountains encircled by cooling mists. The rainforest is sustained by the holy rain shadows of altitude, a gift to the monastic spiders from their goddess on the moon.
They can feel the movement of the earth under their feet, the great spreading apart that reverberates up the mountainside. The spreading and cracking not only of land, but people and community. They despair but their memory runs deep, they know that the pieces of the world dry and shed, and then a new green earth will emerge from underneath.
The Cataxians have statues to their goddess Rosa, who dug the first burrow into the banks of the River Lymph in the cold Dreaming, the Before Time, the Creation time, before she ascended to occupy her home on the lunar surface. The spider monks live cloistered in their abbeys, reading the gospels of Rosa and meticulously copying them to ensure their survival through the Great Drying as they await the Return of the Green.
Hidden Cities 1
The subterranean city of Gaius is situated on the mallee lowlands and cannot be seen until you are right on top of it. The great round doors to the city are emblazoned with the crescent moon, and you enter into white underground hallways that glow faintly as if in moonlight. They also worship Rosa, but consider their goddess too sacred to depict, so her home on the moon is the centre of their spiritual iconography. The Gaians see themselves as descendants of the moon itself, that their bodies grew from fallen moon dust that their goddess kicked out when she dug her burrow.
The Gaians once lived in Cataxia, but they left, choosing to go out into the drying world so that the citizens of the Silk Continent could still access the Gospels of Rosa. They figure that their goddess lives in a desert herself. The dry lowlands are harsh on their bodies, so they keep time with the moon, living their lives in the dark, rarely visiting the surface during the day.
Thin Cities 1
The city of Hortophora was once quiet and peaceful, but then the Empire arrived, a powerful cohort of adversaries who invaded from the east. These interlopers drag a safety line of paved roads and train tracks in their wake, keeping them connected to their supplies, military and culture anywhere they go. The roads carry a constant stream of resources that arrive from previously vanquished cities, in effect creating a conquering machine of endless expansion. Hortophora has never been entirely captured, but it finds itself pinned in place. They practice their culture in secret, weaving their silk medicines to keep their communities intact.
The winds are shifting on the Silk Continent, and they carry a dry, brittle, flaky, dust. The Hortophorans have learned that the Empire is being pursued by a rapidly expanding desert. This desert consumed their own homelands, and has followed them here. Refugees from the Empire’s continent are arriving, in desperate need of aid.
Hortophora’s Elders can hear the wailing of the refugees of Empire, suffering without clothing, bandages and food wraps. Hortophoran medicine is the only thing that can help them. What can Hortophora do? It is their culture to be hospitable, and the Empire’s culture to be brutal. Do they become brutal to protect themselves? Or do they follow their culture, give openly and in the process be consumed to dust? At night the Elders feel their eyes drift up to the moon and wonder if this desert of death has been sent by their lunar goddess. But is it deliverance or a test?
Cities and Memory 2
No civilisation on the Silk Continent has a more transparent society than the archive city of Pholcus. The Pholcusians consider themselves living stories. When they grow and shed their skins, they hang their exoskeletons in the great public gallery, their lives to be examined, sheafs of history shifting in the breeze. The Empire did not lob their bombs into Pholcus, something stayed their hand, and they treat the city with the respect one might give a museum, or mausoleum. Pholcus puzzles the Empire, they did not even know to hang their exoskeletons, when their solidiers shed them they simply discard them in the streets. The Pholcusians live a colonised life seemingly at the bemusement of their invaders, who tolerate a quaint culture that seems to remind the Empire of something that it has lost.
The desert is coming and it will make brittle the great skin books of Pholcus history. The Empire may well lose their fascination when the hard times come and crush Pholcus underfoot. But the Pholcusians know that their culture lives in them, and what is shed is but a shadow. The skin histories will always be the past, the culture lives in the body that emerges. And what is underneath shed skin is a bigger, stronger spider.
Cities and Desire 1
Atracidae is a frightening city. It sits on the very eastern edge of the continent, in view of the desert that is slowly consuming the Silk Continent from East to West. Each year the sands of the terminal desert blow closer, and great dunes are piling up all around the city walls. The Atracideans are warriors, and fought great wars against the Empire when they made landfall many years ago. Their legend spread through the Silk Continent and the Empire’s homelands, of fierce defenders who held off many invasion attempts, then becoming a guerilla army when the city was eventually overrun. Atracideans fight to the death, with only a few being successfully captured alive.
Atracidae has gone quiet. There have been no stories of resistance for a long time.
The Empire is deeply afraid of the terminal desert, which has followed them across the seas to this world. They torture the captive Atracideans, extracting their spiritual juices using lightning rods, and drinking their essence, desperate to find a cure for a world falling apart. From within the Empire’s death camps the Atracideans’ hearts are burning. They are warriors, but are losing their minds from this new kind of violence. They drift threads of silk through the prison bars and reach for the rays of the moon. Why is Rosa ambivalent to their suffering? Have they broken her laws in some way? Is anyone coming to save Atracidae?
Empty Cities 1
Before it was abandoned, the inhabitants of the Silk Continent had always been wary of the shadowy city of Maratus. Outwardly they seemed like a merry city, with many festivals for visitors that were alive with colour and music. The Maratans were famous for their dances, their iridescent bodies catching and throwing the light, mesmerising anyone who watched.
However there were no statues of Rosa in the town squares, and no moon emblems above doorways. Unusually, the Maratans walked the streets in the heat of the day. They appeared to sleep at night instead of paying homage to the goddess.
They denied that they were heretics, claiming to worship the Afternoon Moon, those times when Rosa’s lunar abode is visible against the blue sky. They said that their spirituality was practised when not only they could see the moon, but when their goddess could see them too. They worshipped when the sun lit up their bodies, and their feverish dances resembled a suitor trying to catch a potential lover’s attention.
Maratus sits in the foothills of the Mygal Mountains, and at times the whole city can be cast in the shadow of the holy summits. When the shadow fell visitors spoke of strange sounds of construction, and being subject to curfews that kept them off the streets. A visiting royal claims to have seen a marquette of a miniature tower in the war rooms, an impossibly spindly structure made of twigs and silk.
When the other cities sent ambassadors to Maratus to warn them of the Empire, they did something that no other city did. The Maratans ate the ambassadors. They closed their gates and shut themselves off from trade and ceremony. Neighbours claimed to see great ladders being carried up the mountain side, year after year after year. When the Empire finally reached Maratus, they pushed open the gates and found it completely empty. Every Maratan was gone.
High above, the spider goddess Rosa watches over the Silk Continent, great legs shifting in her alabaster burrow. The moon never sheds its skin, and neither does she, both goddess and lunar abode sunk deep in The Always and The Everywhen. She snatches a passing comet and sups from the ice tail, before releasing it to continue its journey through dark space.
