The Beautiful and Silent City Built Upon a Sleeping God

Once upon a time there was a beautiful and silent city built upon a sleeping god. It had no walls or battlements, its intimate courts and open squares blending imperceptibly into parks and meadows, and yet no army dared approach, though its smallest storehouse held more wealth than all the kingdoms of the East. Its ancient architects had raised it without the sounds of hammers or shovels, and its towers stood like a white and gold and grey forest in an eternal springtime above the god. There were no bells in the spires, so slender that the wind hardly whispered as it flowed around them, but their roofs sparkled in sunlight or moonlight or starlight. The songbirds of that land had long since been captured and bred for beauty and silence, like the long-haired cats that stalked them around the statues of the city's great men and women, which were so numerous that a fruitseller might use as his address By Barleol the Geometer, while the goldsmith next door would use as hers An-alar the Third Blind Storyteller. In an open space at the center of the city stood a statue of the last great musician of their race, holding his wooden instrument, remade every century by artisans who did not know how to play it, and weeping. His name had been forgotten.

The jewelery made in silence and unseen by An-Alar were worn by women dancing barefoot to the rhythms of changing patterns of light with their men, who had never heard their lovers cry out at the moment of ecstacy. At their marriage ceremonies the vows were given by intricate gestures which had become a form of dance, a dance which flowed among the celebrants and into the streets and throughout the city, where an onlooker unschooled in the language of movement might take commerce or politics for sarabandes or ballet. And yet more elegant were the gestures of the artisans who, perhaps haunted by the unsettled dreams of the god, depicted in their pottery and tapestries the deaths of stars and battles in the emptiness between galaxies. The poets of the city, freed from the constraints of a language which had been liquid and beautiful, wrote muscular odes, earthy sonnets, abstract limericks. And the city's philosophers, after millenia of emotional debates, had come to a reconciliation between their beliefs and understanding and knowledge. Yet the greatest accomplishments in the city were those of its composers; on every wall one could find the latest symphonies and chamber music scored in purely metaphorical ways for instruments whose sounds existed only in each person's imagination. And after many thousands of years it was believed that the god would never waken.

One day a young composer, who had written a sonata which captured all the achievement of the city's artisans and completed the development of its ages of unplayed music, had a dream. He saw the statue of the last musician come to life and heard it play his music. He watched the bow sweep back and forth and the marble fingers flash. At the end, the statues of the silent astronomers and painters and statesmen wept and laughed, and the god awoke and rose, singing the composer's sonata with the voice of the instrument, yet a thousand times louder, then again, infinitely more beautifully, and danced about the shattered city and strew its glittering fragments beyond the horizon, and it seemed the unheard music echoed from the heavens. When the young composer awoke, he remembered and understood the gestures of the musician. He ran to the statue, took up the instrument, and woke that beautiful and silent city built upon a sleeping god.