...
The docks of the Impenetrable City were both spectacular and depressing. Far downstream, past the fields and orchards of the encircled lands that surrounded the Harbor Town, the towering Outer Wall of Ba Sing Se passed over the broad expanse of the river, two cavernous vaulted openings cleaving the vast flowing expanse of water. On clear days one could look down the river to see the dwarfed forms of giant wooden trading ships emerge from within, tiny before the weight of stone above those dim tunnels. From that guarded portal to the outside world the paddle steamers and sailing junks landed home at the wharfs themselves; long stone piers each capped with an ancient and elegant dock master's building that held the ever present reach of the government.
Here the ships of the world came in great numbers to carry away the wonders of the endless city and to feed the citizenry's insatiable need for every conceivable good. Though these piers of the Harbor Town faced the river and not the sea like other ports, by here the Kuang had regained most of its old power. Fed by the draining of innumerable canals, sewers, aqueducts, and water-roads the reformed river lay broad enough for eight warships to sail abreast. The royal school of the Adept Earthbenders of the Harbor dredged the river regularly enough that even the deep-keeled steel ships of the Fire Nation could dock with ease.
It was those sharp and sleek shapes, rising out the dirty water like black metal obelisks towards their smokestack crowns, that showed the injury in the soul of the waterfront. For decades of war, blockades and piratical predations had rendered the City's navy helpless and the Kingdoms' merchant fleet fearful to approach Ba Sing Se. Now in these days of peace the docks were revived and there was work once more, but it was painfully obvious that the few repairs to the years of neglect had been paid for with silver from those same dark foreign ships that had once brought the city low.
Yet this morning Ayika walked past door after door of merchant's offices festooned with banners proudly announcing that they carried Fire Nation products. Fashion was no patriot and currently everything from those western islands was in high demand. Everything that was new and exciting came from overseas. Not that Ayika could spare much attention to these entrancing sights and advertisements. The Harbor Town's docks were busy from before the first light of day. Now that the sun was creeping into the sky they were chaos.
Though the unintelligible din that crowded the air Ayika strode on familiar cobbles, walking across bridges under which long-nosed canal boats piled high with goods were poled from the river to deeper into this damp suburb. As she passed an empty ship berth, Ayika looked out onto the river to see her father's little pilot boat making its way towards the shadowed gates of the outer wall, guiding a wallowing trading vessel downriver towards the bay and the sea beyond. She could just make out the captain of the boat with his ridiculous green hat but her father was just a slightly darker-skinned blotch at this distance amongst the other sun-tanned backs pulling on the oars and the ropes to the sails.
Moments later, past lines of porters carrying overloaded burdens in a continual current to and from the bellies of the tethered transports, around a foul pool of something suspect, and under a banner proclaiming a respected importer of fine Island glass, Ayika arrived at the particular occupied berth that was her destination. Here a line of longshoremen was pulling mightily at a thick rope wrapped around and among a pile of wooden crates that were now creaking in protestation.
One man, older than the rest, was off to the side screaming at them.
"Pull you useless clods!" he yelled. "Li, if I ever find what motherless idiot taught you your knots I am going to do my own practice with his gizzard!" His words were shouted strong and clear despite the nasty curling scar that ran under the man's lower lip. The dockworkers gave another straining effort at pulling the rope loose with the looks of those embarked on a doomed enterprise.
The foreman continued to yell, "If we have to cut that line I am going to have you scum splicing till the moon sets! See that I... And where under the sky are you going!?"
The tallest of the workers, a young man built like a bull in a vest, had left the group and was staring in a distant manner at the pile of rope and timber. Oblivious to the curses of his foreman he now began to climb on the boxes themselves. For a moment he just stood frozen on the top silhouetted against the hazy sky as he looked down at the tangled ropes and crates, but then the instant snapped and he called down to the other men.
"I've got this figured, pass the line up to me!"
As the other longshoremen gathered up their obstinate twined adversary, this young man of about twenty years leaned down and shielded his eyes against the sun to peer down into a crack between the crates.
"Get down off there!" his supervisor yelled as the young man stood again, taking up the problem rope in one hand. "You're just going to... At least wait until you got help up there! Sun, Lasu, get scrambling!"
"No, it's ok." The quiet look was back on the boy's face as he idly shifted his grip on the hempen line. That rope was as thick as Ayika's arm but the young man handled it absently in his off hand without a hint of effort. "We were just going at it from the wrong angle." With that he set his feet against the planks of the top crates and began to pull. His muscles bulged beneath his short sailor's vest and his face grew red with effort. His fellow workers moved to help but before they could get to him the young man gave a slight stumble and the rope anticlimactically slackened.
The workers turned at the sound of clapping to see Ayika leaning against a bolard-post next to the harbor street applauding their performance. She got nods of recognition from many of fhe men as she walked in towards the scene of the late crate based battle holding the Bao brothers' lunch package. They were used to seeing Kadat's daughter here. The problem of the tangled crates resolved longshoreman got about their business of unloading the ship. Well, most of them did.
"Hey, Xiaobao!" one called out. "How do I sign up for that delivery service? You can keep the lunch but you best be sharing those clams!" He then laughed at his obscene joke.
Maolin 'Xiaobao' Bao, the tall young man who had just jumped down from on top the stubborn pile of cargo, turned red and started to say something to the other dockworker. However, Ayika was quicker and yelled back over her shoulder at the would-be comedian. "That you, Chouyu? I thought you were in lockup by the market for trying to feed your oyster to the sheep!"
The man's answering laugh just made Xiaobao darken another shade. The docks-man just slapped his knee and called back to Ayika. "That's a good wharf rat! Tell your pop I'm still looking to deck with him some night!" With that the man climbed back up the ramp and vanished over the gunwale of the docked ship they were working.
Xiaobao smiled ruefully as Ayika passed him the lunch package. "I would say something to them about talking like that..." he said. "But, well, you know how it..."
"Just take your food, moron." Ayika replied with a grin. She then affected an exaggerated posh accent. "Oh yes, Ah have never in all mah years heard such dreadful language upon mah fair ears. Ah was defiantly not raised in the Bed and thus Ah need constant protecting, mister man." She fluttered her eyelashes.
Xiaobao just laughed at this and when she punched him in the side it was like hitting a slab of beef. Flexing her fingers, she looked around at the men working nearby and noticed something. "Hey," she said. "Where's Xinfei? Mom packed for both of you."
At this Xiaobao looked slightly guilty. "Well, you see, last night he came to me saying he had..."
"Oh god," Ayika said, sinking her head in exasperation. "Let me guess, he had a 'sure-fire product' this time. That's the third scheme this month and he is back working here within two days each time. I swear, you two are lucky that Mister Gaoli wants to take care of you guys." As soon as she said it she knew she had phrased that very wrong. There were some situations which should not be remarked on so flippantly. "Wait, I mean..."
"Nah, I got you." But Xiaobao was smiling a little less than before as he continued. "Yeah, he's got a box of something with Islander stamps on the lid which he says a man told him can let you summon flame like a firebender. By this point I just try to make sure he doesn't have too much money on him at any time. And keep it out of our mom's hands as well. She would just give it to him if he asked." Looking at the sky he nodded. "Make sure to thank your ma for me tonight. You should be getting on anyways, off to serve the all the fancy lords and ladies," he finished with a slight grin.
This time he dodged her punch. "Shut up." Ayika grumbled playfully. "I'll try to find your idiot brother if I get a chance."
As she walked off Xiaobao yelled back one last exchange. "Hey, watch out when you head past the Exclusion. I heard that there's a chance some idiot university boys are going to try and do something over that way."
Ayika waved in acknowledgement and quickened her pace as she made her way off the docks and towards the older, better-kept portion of the town. Perfect, more nationalist university brats and thus more anti-Fire Nation protest posters. Why could those rich boys not stay in the city's middle ring but instead had to make their way down to Ayika's own town outside the wall? She personally suspected those students needed to keep the glue pots a bit farther from their noses on the evidence of how much they liked those stupid banners, posters, and signs they put up everywhere. Evidently they thought someone might not yet know just how they felt about the foreigners. There were always rumors that they were about to do something much bigger than just defacing walls and loitering in tea shops; all likely started, Ayika thought, by the boys themselves.
She made her way down the road beside a well-trafficked canal packed to the brim with long, overloaded boats. The watercraft were slowly moved along by pilots swaying their single rear oar from side to side, often nearly buried behind the lashed piles of cargo piled before them. Her destination was a distant structure that loomed up above the dark tiled roofs of the town, a truncated stone ziggurat summited by a large elevated canopy over the flat open platform. That was the terminus of the elevated transport line that linked the docks to the City proper. The earthbending powered tram system carried both the people and supplies that the metropolis imported.
Around her the buildings slowly became more ornate, the stone bridges arching over the canals more elaborate, evidencing the wealth of the old quarter of the harbor town. As distant and disreputable as the harbor was to the heart of the City, merchants and government functionaries had reason to be there on occasion so she now passed those establishments that catered to them. Tea houses with painted screens, drinking houses with gilt signs, and houses of pleasure filled with the faint sound of instruments and the swish of silk. As much as Ayika loved the drifting clouds of exotic scents, something about these pretensions of grandeur in such an ungrand place made her vaguely uneasy. She supposed that there was a measure of insecurity in the gaudiness, and as she rounded a corner in the path she confronted the explanation.
Here her path ran alongside a wide water-street, deep and strait. To each side she could see the angled intersections of canals that marked off a rectangular moat in the middle of the waterlogged town. The brown water's surface was broken by hundreds of tiny boats scuttling back and forth like water-striders to the island that had been thus encircled. Yet despite the commercial activity at river level the white painted walls of the buildings on the street side were broken by no doors or windows. No citizen of the kingdoms wanted to be reminded about the embarrassment that rose up proud and strong across that barrier water. Ayika might have agreed with this sentiment but the lights and towers of the Fire Nation Exclusion smiled back uncaringly; an island of red painted spires and foreign mansions set down in the Earth Kingdoms' greatest city.
As she continued on her way through the street traffic Ayika glanced to her side at the alien architecture. When her family had arrived in this country just prior to her birth none of that had existed. She recalled her father telling her that in the early years of the peace, when the word 'Harmony' was still on everyone's lips, the Fire Nation had sent an ambassador from their capital of Jingdu. The top-knot coifed foreigners, for so long having been unstoppable conquerors, were now humbly approaching the King of Kings speaking of friendship and trade.
The people of the City had smiled when they heard the Earth King had gifted the ambassador an estate and grinned when they heard that it was an island down in the Harbor Town. It was a move at once generous and insulting, surely signaling the Impenetrable City's return as the center of culture and diplomacy for the entire civilized world. Despite the decades of war across the world and siege after siege outside its gates, the City had been mostly unscathed. Ba Sing Se had sealed itself off to rely on the broad belts of farmland within the outer curtain wall. All the while in the inner rings life had continued at its ancient refined pace uninterrupted save the final brief final chaos of the revolt.
It had taken one year after the ambassador's arrival for it to became clear how wrong those confidant snickers had been. There had been confusion when the ambassador had razed the old humble estate on the island at the outer edge of the Harbor Town. The building had once the home of some poet exiled from all four rings of the city for some political misstep and was dull but large and serviceable. Pieces of the discarded stonework had appeared on the market to the delight of amused native customers who could chuckle at the foolish foreigners. There had been laughter when people told stories of the ambassador living in rented apartments while his newly acquired lands were swarmed with muddied workmen. Crafty city merchants smirked behind their hands at Islanders paying ridiculous prices for rundown warehouses and unused berths in the stricken harbor. They all shared the same thought; those barbarians might know war but this city is where commerce was invented and they would soon bleed those foreigners dry.
There had been only shocked silence when the goods disgorged from the incoming stream of massive metal ships had arrived in the harbor market. Everyone knew that Islander steel was cheaper than what was made on the continent; they built their boats out of it. Many in the rich inner rings had also looked forward to once again being able to buy Island-made glass, universally acknowledged to be the best for quality and intricacy of design. But it was not just glass and steel that exited those holds from distant shores. There were textiles, silks, woodworks, and marvels no one in the city had dreamed to exist all at prices below anything the homegrown craftsmen could compete with. The Fire Nation merchant vessels were a display more terrifying than the might of their armada.
The new Exclusion district that sprouted on the ambassador's island was an unintentional symbol of that surprising power. Denied room to expand outwards and live elsewhere in the city the Islanders had built up, their sharply peaked red roofs now twice as high as any building in made by local hands. Underneath that forest of tiled spikes, in those tight streets and soaring walkways, music and light blazed in constant celebration throughout the night. Those streets were lit by modern gas-lamps long after the rest of the city retreated to their homes. At times Ayika could understand the feelings of those protest posters that continually appeared on the walls in the dark hours. It was humiliating. Even now she passed a tired old man with a scraper and a cart removing a fresh crop of paper outrage.
This one appeared to say "Strength to the People! Resist Foreigners!" Or at least it probably had to begin with. Now after the old man's efforts against the glue the remaining strips of paper seemed to announce "Give the Foreigners a Good Nap!". While considerate, this was probably not the author's intent. Beyond it a line of similar proclamations stretched on into the distance along the walls facing the water, shouting inken words in broad black characters across the canal at those red towers. Ayika could not help thinking that were many angry people in the city. Even ink was threatening when it is painted by ten thousand furious hands.
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