The Ring Market

The great public square of the second ring holds the market: a colonnaded agora about a tiered fountain, roofed at its centre by a vast canopy and open at its edges to the canals. Here the produce of the rings and the cargoes of the airships and the sea-craft are traded — fruit and fish and flowers, marble and brass and cloth, the painted ware and carved work of the island, and the goods the sky-roads bring from far off.

It keeps an old and easy order: the food-rows under the canopy by the fountain; the cloth and the painted ware in the shaded colonnades; the brass, the tools and the small machines along the canal-edge where the barges unload; and, at the landward steps, the day-stalls of whoever has something to sell and the patience to call it. Weights are kept true by the Society's measurers, prices are sung rather than haggled, and a striped awning means a stall will feed you whether your purse is full or not — a courtesy of the rings no one is too proud to use.

The square is also the city's parlour. Citizens take their ease at the fountain; orators speak from the steps; musicians play in the colonnades; and the Civic Society holds its open lectures beneath the canopy on market-days. The visitor who would understand Aurei should spend an afternoon here doing nothing in particular.