No one speaks after we exit the final room and walk down the staircase. This is the way the tour is designed. First the monster swallows you, then it digests you and eventually you come out of the other end feeling filthy.
The exit hall resembles the entrance. We have to queue for the gates in the iron-bar wall again. Only here the queue is slower and stretches all the way outside. I look at the others who have come to receive their annual tattoos. Many of them have brought families and friends, and some of them will be throwing parties today. But even they must first come to the Ink-marking. No one on the island avoids that.
As I scan the space, I spot the man with a scar on his hand again. He has taken his place in another queue a little ahead of me. Dozens of glow-glass globes hanging from the ceiling paint the space blue. The man clasps his hands behind his back. His palm turns up. I expect to see his tattoo again.
It is not there.
The distance is long enough that I may not discern the scarring, but I am certain that I would see the glowing tattoo. He was not standing further away from me in the room where I first noticed it. But now his palm is bare, his skin without any markings.
I almost move to join the same queue with him, try to find a reason to talk to him. But the queue proceeds and people flow between us, a whole open sea, impossible to cross. I lose sight of him.
The exit opens to a square on the other side of which the Tower rises larger than I remember, a storm-grey column against a blue sky. The sun glistens dimly on its stone surface and the mist has dissipated on the streets. The queues trickle towards the checkpoints and the inkmasters’ tables behind which they meld into the billowing crowd.
I look where I cannot help looking, none of us can.
The Dreamers stand in the middle of the square on a dais, four women and four men. None of them is young. One of the women wears an eyepatch and one of the men is missing a hand. They are barefoot and grey-clad, and the mark of the Tainted is clearly visible on each of their foreheads. A City Guard with a hand on spear-haft has taken a place at each corner of the dais, and at the foot of the dais an entire front of them stands in formation.
The queues reach and move. The autumn-dampened sun pours lukewarm light on faces. The prisoners stand silent, still, have been standing for hours. No one offers them water or food.
Eventually it is my turn to sit in front of an inkmaster. He wipes his tattoo needle and dips it in an ink jar. I pull my sleeve up to bare my arm above the dark lines.
The song of the seashell horn pauses. A wave passes through the crowd, another. It is finally time for what everyone has gathered to wait for. On the upper balcony of the Tower the wide doors open, and the Council steps out through them. Their coral masks glint in the sun like freshly shed blood against stone-coloured cloaks. The noise growing from the crowd resembles the whistling of the wind.
The inkmaster brings the needle onto my skin and begins to tap its handle with a stone in order to pierce the skin, drawing another mark right next to the crook of my arm. I look away and clench my hand into a fist. My eyes water from the pain. Weaving will hurt for a week at least, and the itch left by the needle where the ink has entered under the skin never quite goes away.
The ringing of the bell is crisp and sharp as the edges of the afternoon shadows.
I turn to look at the dais again. A man wearing a loose coat bearing the sun emblem leaves the foot of the Tower, approaches the dais with unrushed footsteps and climbs onto it. He holds an opaque glass bowl in which eight wooden sticks have been arranged. The man stops before the first Dreamer.
I have wondered many times which stick I would wish to draw from the bowl if I were to stand on the dais one day. I change my mind every year.
The Dreamer woman draws from the bowl a wooden stick approximately the length of her palm. I do not discern her expression clearly from this far away, but I notice she turns her head in order to see how the Dreamer next to her will choose. When the man carrying the bowl moves to stand before the third Dreamer, I see the first two holding wooden sticks of similar length in their hands. I cannot tell if their faces are disappointed or relieved.
I shiver. The inkmaster wipes the droplets of blood from my skin with a cloth that does not look very clean. I pull my sleeve back down to cover the twenty-four lines on my arm. I am officially one year older. My skin smarts when the fabric touches it. I get up and move into the crowd through the checkpoint gate.
The bowl-bearing man has proceeded to the second-to-last Dreamer. The other six are holding sticks of similar length in their hands. The breathing of the audience has quieted, and no one speaks. Somewhere, a child bursts into tears.
The Dreamer pushes his only hand into the bowl and slowly draws out one of the two wooden sticks. It is twice as long as the others. A howl-like scream rises from the audience and people begin to clap and stomp, when the man lifts the stick high in the air for everyone to see. Something resembling a smile visits his face, wide and stiff as if it were painted on. For form’s sake the last Dreamer draws the remaining short stick.
The bowl-bearing man turns to the audience.
‘In their great fairness the Council have pardoned this Dreamer,’ he says. ‘He is free to walk the world and leave the island at dawn. In the name of the Council!’
‘In the name of the Council!’ the crowd yells in return. The words leave my lips too before I even know I have formed them.
‘And now we shall together swear an oath of loyalty to the Council, who in their wisdom pilot the island through all storms,’ the bowl-bearer says.
The words of the oath begin to flow from me with the choir of voices. They who raised the Tower with their own hands and watch the city from atop of it, to them I am faithful.
The Dreamer who drew the long stick is walked down from the dais and led away from sight behind the museum. The guards guide the seven other Dreamers into a cage on wheels, which they begin to transport towards the large black gondola of the House of the Tainted. The oath pours past me like water.
They who feed us and clothe us and make us strong, to them I am faithful.
The wheels of the cage clatter on the stones of the square.
They who drove sickness away from the island and purged our sleep forever, to them I am faithful.
One of the Dreamers in the cage throws herself against the bars, the old woman with an eyepatch.
‘Lies!’ she shouts. ‘It’s all lies!’
If the stones of the streets crumbled from under me and the canals escaped their confines, I would place my life in their hands and be faithful to them.
Two guards wrench the door of the cage open and tear the woman out.
‘Lies!’ she yells again. ‘Ask yourselves why—’
One of the guards hits the woman so hard she goes quiet and begins to weep with pain. The guard ties a scarf to cover the woman’s mouth. I see a red stain spreading on the scarf.
If the sea climbed over my doorstep, I would let their ships carry me to safety and I would be faithful to them.
The City Guards drag the woman into the crowd and I do not see her again. Somewhere another gondola is waiting, a narrower and more enclosed one, and aboard it is a cage covered with black fabric. I think of the woman inside it. I think of the longer stick that she might have drawn from the bowl, and of the man who did draw it: of the ship he will be taken to in the faint light of dawn that will carry him somewhere with a strange language and jobs different from those he is used to. I think of the man looking back towards the island from aboard the ship for the last time, knowing he can never return.
Above everything the Council stands quiet, does not raise a hand, does not move.
The oath comes to an end and my lips are still moving, but my voice