The Galleria of Jijangola

(This just happens to be my thirtieth post since I started NaBloPoMo (well, thirty-first, but that one on Monday really doesn't count). I have now officially made up for that week I missed. As a result, I will not necessarily be posting every day, but I'll try to keep writing all the same.)

It's Winter in Jijangola. The harvest is over; the fields are empty; the light is fading fast. It's cold outside. The children have nothing to do until the first snow coats the spires and turrets of the Galleria like icing on a wedding cake. Their parents have nothing to do until the Spring planting.

This is when most of the work is done.

The Galleria is Jijangola's center and its people's obsession. Every single one of them spends every spare moment they have working on it, quarrying stone, lifting, cementing, carving, painting, polishing, decorating... It takes up more space now than the village used to. It's been a long time since there was a village. Now, there's only the Galleria.

The whole thing started with someone's nine-times-great grandparent - or everyone's, possibly. It depends on who you ask. Spindle beetles and burrellers and even a few pygmy land-eels all claim the foundations of the Galleria were laid by their own nine-times-great grandmother or grandfather.

It's grown since then. It's large enough by now to start shifting. Rooms and passages move when you take your eyes off them. Murals connect with each other, often - usually - in surprising ways. A stone knight in a winding passage is, quite literally, standing in a forest. The painted trees on the wall continue straight across his chest. Birds and rabbits peer out of gaps in his armor, and roots twine around his segmented feet. There are apples growing on his left shoulder. Farther on, a gray statue of a man is kissing a painting of a woman; her two-dimensional sleeves are painted around his gray neck like an embroidered scarf. A necklace of tiny round windows around her neck lets in tiny needles of sunlight from outside.

Of course, as far as I know, this is how the paintings and statues were made in the first place. It wouldn't be any stranger than a lot of the rest of the Galleria. It's hard to tell, though, because the artists are never around to ask. There are hardly more than a hundred people in all of Jijangola (as much as anyone can keep count); even so, I've never been able to find out who created any particular part of the Galleria unless I found them still working on it. No one ever seems to know who built or carved or painted anything that's been finished.

Perhaps they've taken on a life of their own.

Whoever started the Galleria, they seem to have begun it as a rather small chapel. At least, that's what the Jijangolans say - most of them agree that the little stone chapel, buried now under a labyrinth of walls and passages, is the oldest part of the building. They can still all fit into it when they remember. Jijangola is not a large village, at least not in terms of inhabitants; stones outnumber people several hundred thousand to one.

About a third of the stone in the Galleria is quarried out of its equally labyrinthine basements and catacombs; the rest, according to the people who bring it, comes from something called the Rubble Heap. I'll have to try to find that when we move on - almost half the stone comes already carved. A lot of it looks very old. In a dusty dead-end hallway lit by Gothic arched windows, I found that someone had assembled mismatched carved words and letters into a rhyme:

And hence with LIBRARY buILT beside
THE amber founded northw st side
TOLL BO TH permit INQUIRE INSIDE
and VANisHED To the EXIT

Walking back down the hallway, I realized that the rhyme was only one of many. What I had thought were random assortments of carved fragments in the walls were actually writing, each one assembled the same way. The hallway was built entirely out of rhymes. The one at the end was simply the only one I could understand.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was an entrance to the Palace of Madmen in here somewhere. It might be hard to tell the difference.

Most people in the Galleria seem to spend all their time lost in it. They farm and hunt just like anyone else, but they generally just leave the food laying around the Galleria for anyone who wants it. You never have to look far to find a meal (though exactly what you might find is anyone's guess). Stone and paint are left, when people deliver them, in heaps by the outside doors; the shifting rooms and passages spread them all over the building. It's perfectly normal to walk through a twisting hallway or lofty chamber and find people rummaging through the clutter on the floor, searching for just the right shade of red or the perfect block of marble.

Visitors to the village are expected to either leave money (someone has to pay the people who bring stone and paint and cloth) or help with the Galleria. I, of course, chose the latter. They kindly let me work on part of a massive mural that twists along two hundred feet (so far) of tall passageway and stairwell. A black beetle next to me was working on an entire forest of intricately painted knots. I spent most of this morning continuing the loose ends to a grass-green spider, covered with a field of Summer flowers, hanging from one of a flock of hot-air balloons below the same sunset that greeted our arrival in Jijangola. It seemed fitting.

One tower, the place where I spent the most time yesterday evening, is completely hollow inside; the only way to reach the top is to climb the downspout gargoyles that line the inside in evenly spaced rings. The water from all the nearby rooftops (which have gradually grown almost as high as the tower itself) flows through a maze of pipes and gutters to the outside of the tower, where it pours in through the gargoyles. A thousand and fifty-seven spouts of water (I counted) pour from their mouths, forming a huge waterfall in the center of the tower that falls straight into the well built into the floor. It's like the inside of a sea dragon's throat.

The edges of the tower, between the gargoyles, stay completely dry except for the occasional leak. It's fairly easy to climb to the top.

At the top of the tower is a round room with no openings except a hole in the floor and another in the ceiling. The walls are completely made of stained glass. It's like the top of a lighthouse, except that where the light should be, there's a smaller waterfall that pours down through the hole in the ceiling.

I got soaked climbing up through the hole, but it was worth it.

The roof is a shallow, copper-shingled bowl. The rain swirled down into the hole like dishwater into a drain. Looking down through it, the light of my salamander lantern just reached the converging waterspouts at the top of the tower waterfall. They looked like the petals of a white flower in the darkness. Looking over the outside edge of the roof-bowl, I could see the rooftops of the Galleria spread out below me, a labyrinth of peaks and gables and spires and turrets lit by the moon and hundreds of candlelit windows. Someone with wings was flying around and around a tower, wrapping it in loops of silver chain. The links sparkled every time they passed a window.

It was beautiful. I was getting soaked, though, which is an especially bad idea in December, so I came back down after only a minute or two.

There was a postbird in the room when I got there. How it got in, I had no idea; its wings would never have fit through either of the holes. We sat there for a while in companionable silence. The postbird dozed quietly as I wrote by salamander light. I left last night's letter on the floor when I went to sleep, and it and the bird were gone this morning.

I slept in the stained-glass room all night; it's not every day I find a nice high place like that. I love high places. Climbing down was much easier this morning. The sunlight that comes in through the gargoyles' mouths is still very faint, and the tower has no windows except at the top, but the candles melting on the stone heads weren't drenched by rain this time. Someone had lit all of them. Maybe they had lit themselves. I don't know.

I could spend a year just exploring this place. I have a feeling that I still wouldn't see all of it. I may have a chance to do just that, at least for some time; Plack and I wandered off in different awestruck directions when we entered the Galleria, and I haven't seen him since. Oh well. We'll find each other (and the exit) eventually.

Still, I think we'll be staying here for a while.

Jijangola

We came up over the edge of the Greenhouse Cliff this morning, rising out of the cloud layers like saltwater chucklefish rising out of the sea. The sky was filled with sunset. I'd almost forgotten what the sky looked like. Sheets and wisps of flaming orange and peach spread across the ocean-blue background in a ferocious, explosive, magnificent wave that would look completely unbelievable in any picture. Skies can't possibly be that incredibly bright.

This one was, though - and silhouetted against it was the dark, lamplit bulk of Jijangola.

Or, at least, the Galleria of Jijangola.

Same thing.

The Galleria is a massive, insanely intricate, palatial labyrinth of stonework that has been growing in Jijangola for almost two hundred years. The village's houses are long gone. They were in the way. The people live in the nooks and crannies and vaulted passages of the Galleria instead.

When we arrived, it was nearly dark (hence the sunset), and it started raining shortly after we reached ground level. The Jijangolans welcomed us into the Galleria, at least the ones who weren't too absorbed in working on it, and said vaguely that we were welcome to spend the night, or longer, they didn't really care as long as we didn't damage the decorations, and there was some food over that way somewhere if we were hungry.

There was indeed food over that way somewhere, in the form of half a dozen plumpkins on pedestals. They were in a domed room covered with tesselated fish mosaics.

We split one, then moved on into the Galleria...

I'll write more about that tomorrow, though. The wind up here makes it hard to write, and the postbird's getting impatient.

One more thing, though. The people of Jijangola have never taken the time to build a Train station - too busy building the Galleria - but the village is officially part of the Railway Regions. We've made it!

Dinner and a Show

Walking uphill takes a lot longer than walking downhill. Missing bridges don't help either. One hole in the road today, a rather large one, had no sign of a bridge except a few forlorn ropes on posts at both sides. We had to cross on tree roots so covered with moss that it was impossible to tell whether they were rotten or not...

That was all right, though, because we were entertained the rest of the day by capybaras. They seemed to feel it was their duty to walk backwards on the road in front of us and juggle beetles. One of them, a particularly large one, juggled small capybaras who were juggling beetles. I've heard of compound juggling before, but I'd never seen it until today. They didn't speak English (or any other language I know), so we couldn't thank them, but I clapped when we stopped for the evening. Plack gave a sort of non-disdainful snort. The capybaras bowed, squeaked something at us, gave us a grapefruit (which went very nicely with dinner), and went back to their holes in the rock. A few minutes later, the Cliff above and below us lit up with hundreds of tiny windows. Someone started playing what sounded like a miniature harpsichord.

Today has been weird, but entertaining.

In other news, I seem to be growing yet another toe. One more, and I can break my record of last Summer!

The Owl Again

All right, I was just kidding. (I'm not THAT lazy.) Here's that sketch of the Owl, as promised.


It's just a little bronze thing, really nothing special by itself. It always looks worried. I can't say I blame it.

Post

Look, it's a blog post! I think that's enough for today, don't you?

Directions

We found the road today; someone finally gave us directions! Every salamander hunter we've met so far has been either unwilling to talk or just as lost as we are, and the only other person we've met was the captain of the Fernmarvel, who wasn't interested in roads. Roads and airships don't have much in common.

Today, though, we finally met a hunter who wasn't too busy sitting around and waiting to talk to us. This was probably because she was leaving the Boiler Room herself. We passed her coming from a small lava pool in a long stretch of canyon with hardly any of them at all. She was humanoid, dressed in leather from head to toe like most of the more sensitive-skinned salamander hunters. A leather mask and a typical pair of dark hunter's goggles (important when you spend all day staring into pools of lava) covered her face.

Plack and I had almost given up hope asking directions by then, but the sight of someone who wasn't completely engrossed in a pool of molten rock was unusual enough that we tried again.

She gave us directions (hooray!) in a clear alto voice, somewhat muffled by the mask, then went on to explain how she knew where the road was because she had come from the Cliff we were about to start climbing, several weeks ago, before spending the time in between at a remote and lonely lava pool farther along this fairly empty stretch of canyon, because not many hunters came all the way out here and that meant that the salamanders were a lot less cautious and could be caught more easily, which was why she had been so successful. (She obviously had, too; she was carrying four large cages full of the little creatures. Most of them were either chewing on what looked like lumps of coal or looking around, wide-eyed, at the strange wet world above the lava.) She continued that she was heading to Sconth, if she could find it, to sell the salamanders to the farms there that supply lanterns for the libraries, and also to visit her aunt, who ran a small cafe (the Algebraic Apple - perhaps I had heard of it? I hadn't) near the Metallurgical Library, and who needed a new salamander for her oven, since one of hers had somehow gotten its paws on some gunpowder and exploded, so this big one right here - with the blue spots - was going to replace it, because the little ones had time to grow before going off to light libraries, but her aunt needed a big one right away, because if she had to keep going with only the one she still had, it would soon be too tired to bake more than one scone at a time, and then where would all the experimental coppersmiths get their lunches every day? At one of those sad little turnip crisp places? That just wouldn't do.

The Greenhouse Cliff is not a place where you meet many people. The more outgoing travelers generally have to make up for weeks of silence in every conversation.

The hunter kept squinting at us, apparently having difficulty seeing us through her dark goggles. About halfway through the conversation, she took them off to reveal five gleaming compound eyes. I have no idea what the rest of her face looked like; she never took off her mask. After about half an hour, she had apparently talked enough, because she then asked us for directions to the other side. We gave them to her - the road ended near a large dead tree that was fairly easy to spot - and headed on.

Just as she said, the road to the other side began right next to a large, gnarled purple pligma. Apparently, this section is cool enough for them to grow. We reached the bottom of the jungle again this evening; with any luck, we should reach the other top of the Greenhouse Cliff in a few more days.

Salamander Lantern

I've been meaning to post this picture for a while now. This is my new salamander, a gift from Lady Xeredile, straight from the palace furnaces. Isn't it adorable? It sits on top of its lantern all day, draped through the carrying ring to soak up sunlight, then crawls inside and lights up at night. It's brighter than a torch and much better behaved. I don't know how I did without it for so many years. I seem to remember walking into things a lot.

The lamp's a bit large for the salamander now, but it'll grow into it soon enough. Salamanders never stop growing. Other than that, it's a perfect lantern for a salamander. It's got windows made of the special insulated glass found in the Earthmover, a nice wide chimney for air (lit salamanders need lots of oxygen), and space for lots of coal or wood shavings in case it gets hungry. Salamanders only eat every few weeks, but their food needs to be good and flammable when they do. Mine seems very fond of pencil shavings and smoked squid. Fortunately, I have lots of both.

I still haven't come up with a name for it yet; salamanders are pretty much all the same at this age. It's later that they start developing patterns and spines and personalities. I'll name it when it gets a bit bigger.

(Oh, yes - NaBloPoMo is officially over, as is November, but I'm still making up for the first week that I missed. Just five more posts to go...)