If, in her later years, Asima described to someone the town where she grew up, which of course she wouldn’t, she would have been spoiled for adjectives. M’Dahz was the last Imperial town before the Pelasian border and, as such, shared more of the characteristics of their swarthy mysterious people than of the great culture of the Empire. It was a border garrison, a mercantile port, trading post, and caravanserai.
It smelled of spice and of sweat; of work animals and of sweet meats; of the sea and of the desert. It was a meeting of every world and a clash of mouth and eye-watering noises, sights and aromas. It was a maze of narrow streets and alleys, the ramshackle adobe houses often kept from toppling outwards by the heavy wooden struts that were jammed from side to side above head height throughout most of the town. To ward off the worst heat of the day and the periodic cloying sandstorms from the south, the people hung rugs over the beams, turning the alleyways into stygian tunnels and creating a labyrinth.
With the exception of the main thoroughfare that ran from the port to the Bab Ashra, the Desert Gate, the only part of M’Dahz that felt open and fresh was the palace compound, forbidden to all bar nobles, dignitaries and the military. A small and well-tended garden surrounded by elegant balconied residences, the compound presented a solid wall, free of windows, to the outside, shunning the dirty, smelly, noisy town that teemed with life.
The whole town sloped downwards from the desert to the sea, and it was said that a man could walk the streets of M’Dahz for a week without finding a road free of steps. It wasn’t true, of course, but such streets were indeed rare, and every town has to have its little foibles after all. The town was self-styled as the ‘Southern Bastion of the Empire’ though in truth as much Pelasian or desert nomad blood pumped in the veins of its people as that of the Empire. And as for ‘bastion’? Well the town had its walls, along with three grand gates, but the walls had long been abandoned as a defensive perimeter and more often served as the rear wall of a house than a barrier to potential attackers. In fact, for almost a third of their length the walls were now buried deep inside the town itself, invisible without requesting entrance to peoples’ houses.
Space was at a premium in M’Dahz. Everything clustered together as close to the centre as possible, like a pile of broken pots, as the people tried to distance themselves from the outskirts where the dust piled up at the foot of walls and the sand had to be swept daily from the streets. There was certainly no park or garden; no green space; no fields or orchards. But then everything the people needed came from trade: dates and fruit and meat brought by caravan from the oases inland, or grains and meats by ship from Pelasia and the great Imperial cities.
People who visited asked merchants how anyone could live in the conditions they encountered at M’Dahz. But then the merchants would arch their eyebrow and ask in a concerned voice how anyone could consider living anywhere else. M’Dahz was dirty, noisy, smelly, at constant risk of sandstorm, barren and dry. But M’Dahz was life in its rawest form.
Asima would never speak of these things, or how she began as the daughter of a humble seller of animal feeds before her rise to courtesan, concubine, and finally Empress.