Assassin's Quest (UK) by Robin Hobb

Author:Robin Hobb
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780006480112
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Published: 1997-02-28T22:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

Jhaampe

Jhaampe, the cap­ital city of the Moun­tain King­dom, is older than Buck­keep, just as the rul­ing line of the Moun­tain King­dom is older than the house of Farseer. As a city, Jhaampe is as far re­moved in style from the fort­ress city of Buck­keep as the Farseer mon­archs are dif­fer­ent from the philo­sopher guides of the Sac­ri­fice lin­eage that rule the Moun­tains.

There is no per­man­ent city such as we know. There are few per­man­ent build­ings. In­stead, along the care­fully-planned and garden-bordered roads are spaces where the no­madic folk of the Moun­tains may come and go. There is a des­ig­nated space for the mar­ket, but the mer­chants mi­grate in a pro­ces­sion that par­al­lels that of the sea­sons. A score of tents may spring up overnight and their in­hab­it­ants swell the pop­u­la­tion of Jhaampe for a week or a month, only to dis­ap­pear without a trace when their vis­it­ing and trad­ing is over. Jhaampe is an ever-chan­ging city of tents pop­u­lated by the vig­or­ous out­door-dwell­ing folk of the moun­tains.

The homes of the rul­ing fam­ily and the com­pan­ions that choose to stay year round with them are not at all like our castles and halls. In­stead, their dwell­ings centre around great trees, liv­ing still, their trunks and branches pa­tiently trained over scores of years to provide a frame­work for the build­ing. This liv­ing struc­ture is then draped with a fab­ric woven of tree-bark fibres and re­in­forced with a lat­tice­work. Thus the walls can take on the gently curving shapes of a tulip bud or the dome of an egg. A clay coat­ing is spread over the fab­ric layer and this in turn is painted with a shiny res­in­ous paint in the bright hues the moun­tain folk en­joy. Some are dec­or­ated with fanci­ful creatures or pat­terns but most are left simple. Purples and yel­lows pre­dom­in­ate, so that to come upon the city grow­ing in the shade of the great moun­tain trees is like com­ing upon a patch of cro­cus in spring­time.

About these homes and at the in­ter­sec­tions of the roads in this no­madic ‘city’ are the gar­dens. Each is unique. One may centre around an un­usu­ally-shaped stump or an ar­range­ment of stones or a grace­ful bit of wood. They may con­tain fra­grant herbs or bright flowers or any com­bin­a­tion of plants. One not­able one has at its heart a bub­bling spring of steam­ing wa­ter. Here grow plants with fleshy leaves and exot­ic­ally-scen­ted flowers, den­iz­ens of some warmer clime brought here to de­light the moun­tain-dwell­ers with their mys­tery. Of­ten vis­it­ors leave gifts in the gar­dens when they de­part, a wooden carving or a grace­ful pot or per­haps merely an ar­range­ment of bright pebbles. The gar­dens be­long to no one, and all tend them.

At Jhaampe can also be found hot springs, some of wa­ter that can scald a man, oth­ers merely a gently bub­bling warmth. These have been con­fined, both as pub­lic baths and as a source of heat in some of the smal­ler dwell­ings. In every build­ing, in every garden, at every turn the vis­itor finds the aus­tere beauty and sim­pli­city of col­our and form that are the Moun­tain ideal.

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