Back to The Book of Ninety and Nine Doomed Cities
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Ektarxis was of old the home of a mighty race of humen, who had no fear of the sea and built for themselves fortunes and empires upon it. The harbour of Ektarxis was a day’s journey around, and filled with great ships whose sails shone like sunlight on the clouds, ships with gilded prows fashioned into images of gods and men. On those ships there laboured many thousands of slaves and freemen from all the lands that owed allegiance to Ektarxis - green Kalamen of Serim and Flilpansnik with copper bangles on their eyestalks, Lomen with pink eyes and skin like milk, Argandarr wearing the red cords of the prophet, and thick-fingered naked Bemmel of Banjar. There were merchantmen whose decks were piled high with haigus hides from the Isle of Vulk, and jars of aromatic musk from the white sloths of Uz, and dream melons of Kalmahar, where the Malash, father of rivers, meets the green sea; and the great ships of war bristled with a thousand points of starmetal, and had black sails shot through with silver sigils in the shape of sea-eagles.
The harbour was girt with towers and pavilions of white stone, and behind it were seven hills, on which were palaces and temples set among gardens of fragrant zarjassi and amandelwood. At the beginning of summer the zarjassi trees would let go of their flowers, and carpet the gardens with red gold. And the humen youths of Ektarxis would go walking with their lovers in gardens of red gold, and those who played upon the eribor would sneak along beside them from one perfumed tree to another, and keep them always drunken on songs the like of which the world has not today. It is said the songs of the eribor were not written by any race of men, but were living spirits of the air, summoned from a place beyond T’sai. And it is whispered that the players on the eribor could conjure poetry out of the abyss, and weave tapestries out of the shadows of virgins.
As for the wonders of Ektarxis, who can begin to describe them? For ten thousand years it endured, and not a day passed in which it did not gain some new marvel. Each generation of kings that vied to possess it strove to outdo those who had gone before, raising up pyramids and fountain-temples and other things for which our little language has no words large enough. Such was Ektarxis. In the time of its greatness it was ruled by the kings of the Omphalos, proud and generous blue-black men who had swept out of the mountains to cast down a tyrant.
There came to Ektarxis rumours of seas that boiled in the west, and of fiery vapours in the skies, and of western islands cast down by underground fires. And the learned sages of Ektarxis disputed these things, and moral plays of doomed islands were enacted in the theatres of Ektarxis, and it became the fashion to wear black cloaks of Vulkish sea-silk, since the passage to Vulk was become hazardous; and the noble women of Ektarxis wore the golden pearls of Ur-Kortash, which island was no more. And there was written a satirical lament to the horned fisher-folk of Ur-Kortash, as if it was sung by one of the merchants who had made their fortune by its loss. A great statue was comissioned to an admiral whose ship was lost in the foundering of an isle beyond Banjar, cast of silver-bronze by artisans of the T’sai Lho, and its pedestal was of jasper. But as the statue lay in the workshop to be gilded, a great wave came upon Ektarxis from the sea, tall and green as a mountain of Zimbelaine. When it had receded the streets were buried in mud, and all the admirable works of humen cast down into them, or swept to places far away and wholly ruined. And the silver-bronze statue of the admiral had been carried many leagues inland, where in later ages it was worshipped by ignorant folk of the forest.
In the time afterward the shape of the harbour was much changed, and choked with debris swept of the hills or from the depths of the ocean. And the distant lands which Ektarxis was accustomed to reign over were likewise laid waste, or foundered, so those few who survived the wreck of Ektarxis turned their backs to the sea.
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