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In which the most inexplicable of all cities is introduced and a Prime Minister makes time for a citizen.
Lafontaine, like all of the great cities, wasn’t built in a day. It was built in a night.
On March 31st, it was just a waystation by the great railway, smack in the middle of the great prairie. An inn, a telegraph post, a road leading north to where the tribes and homesteaders were. On April 1st, everything changed. Buildings, hundreds of them, sprung up overnight – flats, houses, stores, factories, even a fine pillared place to be the government seat. All empty. All new.
Here’s the strangest thing: no one found it creepy or off-putting. Sure, those who stayed at the inn woke up more than a mite confused, but this new city gave such a big welcoming, warm feeling that anything darker than that didn’t cross their minds. “Come,” it seemed to say. “Stay a bit. Stake out your place. Tell others and fill me up – there’s plenty of room for all.”
So they sent off their telegrams and got on with the business of settling down. When more trains came, as they’re inclined to do when they’ve got the rails, a whole lot of their passengers – and crew! – thought it just wasn’t worth it to go the other half across the country. This city was nice. Why not stay there? On and on it went, with a full hundred thousand staking their way in – by that point, you had cities east and west in a fret. And more to the point, the federal government.
I lived in the capital when the news hit and I’ll tell you, Gullenburgh went nuts. Not so much a panic, nor a celebration, but plenty of clogging up the streets, whispering to each other whatever scrap of information or rumour they heard. The dailies put out special editions, made entirely up of speculation, which were only a shred more accurate than what was threading its way through the people’s ears by word of mouth.
Oh, and there was Parliament. Prime Minister Lark declared that no one was going home until this was all sorted out and what measures should be taken. She put out invitations for someone, anyone from this nouveaux city to come and let them all know what happened, firsthand – but they were all declined, politely as could be managed through the medium of telegram.
A militia was called up – the Princess Aggies, as the unit was commonly called – packed onto a train, and sent west to look into the matter. Attached was the Prime Minister’s own car, occupied by herself, her secretary, reporters from each of Gullenburgh’s three dailies, and no one else. She wouldn’t even take a bodyguard, or perhaps the Princess Aggies were meant to take on that role.
No other MPs. She’d purposefully made sure she didn’t even need to have a member of the Opposition alongside, for after a few days filled up with sweaty, irritable politicians, even the airy House of Parliament seemed rank. They agreed to give her every power to go to the new city and deal with it in however way she saw fit.
It took just three days to get there, but that was enough. The settlers, organised by those who set themselves up as a makeshift municipal authority, built a grandstand and had gifts and honeyed words ready for the Prime Minister the moment she arrived. The foremost of both was the proposition to name the city ‘Larksville’ in her honour – an honour which she gracefully declined. “Perhaps you can revisit the proposal in some decades’ time when I am both dead and buried,” she said, with the famous sparkle in her eye. But for now, the thought of it was too gauche, even for her.
So they named it ‘Lafontaine’, in honour of the great reformer. As someone both dead and buried, she was deemed a very good namesake indeed. Lark stayed for a week, talked a lot, drank a lot, organised even more. Then, after practically forging every one of the nuts and bolts of the actual governance of the city, left for the east once again. Not even Lafontaine’s pull could keep her from the House of Commons for ever or long.
~
You might wonder what happened with the militia, given that there weren’t great mobs for them to take down after all. They didn’t go with the Prime Minister. Instead, at her request, the Princess Aggies stayed behind and became the seed of the municipal police force. Thus, between Lark and a sizable percentage of the militia, you’ve got the first people to visit Lafontaine and not have any burning desire to stay there.
You might also wonder, rightfully, how I can say this with any certainty. There could well have been people prior to the naming who didn’t really care for the city, granted, but if there hadn’t, it definitely started with the Princess Aggies. And I can say that for certain because I was a soldier in the unit – Jane Calvin, militia volunteer in my days off, chemist’s assistant in my days on, and raring to head back to Gullenburgh.
It wasn’t my erstwhile employment that I missed. My employer – a chemist by the name of Erdin whom I don’t care whether I offend here – was a skinflint, stringing me along for years with promises that he’d train me up to be a full-fledged chemist myself. If anything, Lafontaine offered a guilt-free way of detaching myself from that blackguard without offending my stupid sense of loyalty. I never imagined myself being a constable, but one never imagines a lot of things that life coughs up.
No, my objections formed on two grounds: one, I love Gullenburgh, dirty and old as it is. But here’s the thing, it’s the hub of the country. If a decision’s made, affecting the whole of it, you hear it there first. If you don’t like that decision, you can find whoever made it in a pub – or a soda shop, if the poor soul’s an abstainer – and give them an earful. And frankly, I like the oldness of it. I’ve been across the ocean in my vagabond youth, hoofed it all over the Estelian continent, and so many of the cities over here on Deralea seem so new and gleaming in comparison. My heart finds it suspicious, like those cities are unfinished. I don’t get that feeling so much in Gullenburgh, even with its mere three centuries.
Two, my husband. He had a proper job, he loved Gullenburgh as much as I did, and I thought it unfair to drag him over the hills and plains without so much as a ‘by your leave’. Further, I’d only had him a year by then and wasn’t sick of him yet.
But that mattered little. Why? Because Stonild Lark, before she left Lafontaine, took me out for a drink. Or rather, drinks – Lark had an infamous reputation in the capital for how much she enjoyed the sauce. Don’t wonder how pubs and taverns and breweries set up shop so quickly. Farmers and settlers from every direction within a reasonable distance were happy to charge the inflated prices for the initial stores, enterprising souls bought up those stores to sell them for even more highly inflated prices, and breweries followed suit to drive the prices back down. As the week wore on, their first batches were released into the wild, nearly undrinkable but not quite.
We made our pleasantries, rushed through our first pints, and ordered our second. Lark, ever magnanimous even though I wasn’t a loyal Grey voter, shelled out for all of them.
“You don’t like it here,” she started, after we’d taken our first sips. “But I need you to stay here. I’ll convince you to do so, but first, you must tell me why you don’t wish me to do so.”
I recounted all that I told you and she listened, every word. “Lafontaine? It’s the very definition of new and gleaming. It’s unsettling, the whole place. Everyone I’ve talked to outside the militia doesn’t get that. Yes, I know, it’s wonderful living where there’s no rats or vermin scampering about, but isn’t it weird?”
“My line about not being dead and buried was complete hogwash,” she said. “You seem smart; you must realise that.” Truthfully, I hadn’t, but my pride didn’t let me admit it to someone who was effectively my liege, whether there was a queen ruling in far off Spira or no. She placed her stein on the table and peered at the pale liquid inside with distaste – a sight that would’ve astonished everyone in Gullenburgh. “I won’t have my name attached to a place like this, not while I don’t know what it’s about.”
“A city that appears overnight can disappear overnight,” I said.
“One of many possibilities, yes. And its mere existence... Ms. Calvin, do you have any idea what effect this will have on the tribal treaties for this area?” My brain scrambled for the words, coming up empty, but time spent up. Lark twitched her nose. “Neither I. And there’s the fact that we’re so close to the Abelian border, the effect on grain shipments – what farmer with a lick of sense would send her crop to Gullenburgh with Lafontaine so close? So many damnable considerations.”
She continued. “But you must stay. All of you. What they’ve set up to keep order is laughable. There’ve been murders already, mostly the result of scuffles over bloody real estate, that have had only token investigations. Robberies, certainly – there’s no proper infrastructure set up yet to bring supplies in and you’ve drank the unhappy results of inflation. And to be perfectly frank, I need eyes and ears that aren’t here because they’ve decided that this is a veritable promised land. Hence the need for the Princess Aggies. You came here for duty, not infatuation, and you’ll stay for duty.”
“And...” Here came the coup de grace. “For a far better wage than you’ve been earning under that chemist and a fat bonus. Even adjusting for inflation.”
Naturally, I went through the motions of asking for the exact sum and for her to name all the other benefits I’d receive – healthcare, housing and moving compensation, regularly scheduled raises, etc. – topping it off with a spirited bout of haggling, even as she sighed over me bleeding the public coffers dry. “I’ll think it over and give you an answer in the morning,” I said, but we both knew that she had my number.
All she demanded in exchange for giving me a career was a weekly written report, along with telegrams in case of emergencies. Ah, poor Frederick, you didn’t have a chance! I knew he’d come, but I knew there’d be sore conversations afterwards. And the money was too good for me to care overmuch.
We parted on good terms, the Prime Minister and I, to the point where I could have had the audacity to claim her friendship after that evening. I knew I wasn’t unique amongst the Aggies – “I’ll be and have been having the same chat with your fellows, you know,” she told me flat out – but that mattered little.
I slept heavily that night, as I always do, but woke up with the dawn. I breakfasted, jogged around the makeshift ‘barracks’ the citizenry whipped up for us, washed as best I could, dressed. I went to the telegraph office to break the bad news to my husband. Then I proceeded to the newly-minted hotel at which Prime Minister Lark was sleeping and gave her my decision personally. Her clothes were the same as last night, only more rumpled, and black circles rimmed her eyes, but she grinned as though I were presenting her with a full and sealed bottle of finest brandy.
That is how I became Constable Calvin of the Lafontaine Watch. And in the years to come, I damned well earned my wage.
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