The City of Gold was built of smooth, gold-toned stone that turned buttery yellow in afternoon's heat and deep orange when the sun set. This stone, of course, was the reason it was called the City of Gold, though some claimed it was for the golden, waist-high wheat fields that spread out from the city like ripples in a pond.
It hadn't always been a city. Once it had been a town. But that was so long ago, in the time when towns were bundles of small houses grouped so tightly next to and on top of each other that they were essentially one huge house, all under one roof and connected by tile-paved path-ways, the terrace of one living quarter being the roof of another.
That original house-town was now a rambling manor in the center of the city, with a roof of polished blue tile and many columns of white marble twisted round with grape vines. It was surrounded by a dusty golden patio which branched off into dustier streets, all of which eventually wound their way to the market place, a square courtyard shaded by trees which had forced their way up from cracks in the pavement. Here, merchants and farmers did business under small white tents or out in the noisy crowd. There were carts of waxy peppers and blood-red tomatoes, stalls selling ropes of pearls and bales of silk, traders selling strange, soft furs and vials of heady perfumes.
The houses in the city were two or three floors tall, with roofs of glazed tiles in dragon blue, corn yellow, or broad-leaf green. Though narrow, they were often several blocks deep, containing many small courtyards and bath chambers, windows always open to the hot air, white curtains billowing in and out in occasional breezes. It was not uncommon to see windows so tall you could have stepped out of them easily, as wide as doors and left carelessly open.
Roads often branched into gated gardens which anybody could enter, or small courtyards where people gathered around water pumps to fill jugs or do laundry, hanging sopping clothes on the lines that crisscrossed the yard. Sometimes there were small trees planted in clay pots, slender limbs bowed low with the weight of sweet, ripple-skinned lemons or clusters of puckered limes.
Many craftsmen worked in open-air tents with packed-dirt floors, and anybody could wander in to watch them spinning wet clay bowls on wheels or grinding pigment and resin to make paint, or boiling vats of purple dye over open fires or weaving raw, sticky threads on great carved-wooden looms. There were merchants whose slaves pounded grapes for wine or spun glass into delicate vessels of green or blue, and dealers in patterned silk and intricately carved flutes of ivory bone.
