Vecia Sol

A City in the Civen Republic

Vecia Sol considers itself one of the most civilized cities in Civen, and its residents say so at every opportunity. It is a city of galleries and salerooms, troupes and workshops, where a man can make a decent living carving frames and women become wealthy deciding what a painting is worth. It is also one of the major trading cities of the east, with most goods bound for Civenopolis from that direction passing through it first.

History

To move the Legion east across the river that fed the Iron Bay, the Empire built a bridge known as the Crossing. Vecia Sol grew up on the other side.

Built as a mirror to the capital, the settlement was walled from the start. Over time the city outgrew its walls and, as they came down, much of the stone was reused in the buildings that stand there now.

Three patrician houses grew with the city and have run it for most of its lifetime—Valerius, Marlowe, and Katullin. All three are “old money”, and well-known names to those that do business in Vecia Sol.

Two centuries ago, the forum building in the center of the city burned in a fire that raged for days. The Septons of the day declared that the Elemental had made her preference known: her worship wants no permanent structure, and a place hosting such strong emotions was hers by right. The three houses jointly funded a garden in its place, with their names cut into a founding stone in an order that is said to have taken a year to settle. Vecia Sol has held its forums in the open air ever since.

The Garden

The Garden is the heart of the city in the literal sense; it sits at the center and the streets radiate from it. The auction and exhibition houses face onto it, so every saleroom in town has the same view.

It is hedged at the edges, laid out in beds and gravel walks under trees that were planted when it was made, with a colonnade along part of its length and fountains in the older sections. The three houses gave to it separately, and still fund its tending to this day. The statues scattered throughout were placed by House Valerius, with the family name cut into every plinth. A small staff of gardeners is kept on, and the positions rarely come open.

In the center is a large clearing where forums can be held. Civen guarantees that any citizen may speak in the forum regardless of status, and here the only thing standing in the way is whether the crowd will listen. The weather does not have an effect on the forum; debate goes on in the rain, since everyone understands that a patrician can wait for a better afternoon and a working man cannot. Anyone who wants a real audience knows which weeks the Garden is at its best, and which weeks they’ll be arguing to a handful of people and a ground full of mud.

A good amount of business gets done on walks in the Garden. Two people walking cannot easily be listened to, and being seen strolling with someone attracts far less notice than being seen going into a back room with them.

The City

The main streets run out from the Garden like spokes, and what is sold on them changes the further out you go. Closest in is everything the salerooms and workshops buy: pigment and ground colors sold in paper twists, brushes, quills and cut nibs, gold leaf, sealing wax, varnish, framing timber, small tools. Bolts of fabric get propped against the walls where the light can reach them. Further out this gives way to food, household items, and everything else a city needs, while at the edge of the old line there are the haulage yards and anything too large to carry in.

The streets inside the old line will not take a cart, so goods are broken down at the edge of the district and carried in by hand. Vecia Sol keeps a small army of porters who know every alley and back door in the center, and go in and out of every building in it without anyone paying them much attention.

The middle of the city, which locals call “the Old Town”, builds upward on existing buildings. Upper floors overhang until the streets below are little more than gaps, and most tradespeople live directly above their work.

A fair number of the merchants setting up stalls are not from the city. Traders coming through on the eastern road will set up for a few days on a spoke that runs down to the crossing, sell what they have, and move on. That street is the loudest and least respectable in the city, and generally has the most interesting goods.

Southwest, where the ground drops toward the water, are the fish markets and the landings. The ground floods often enough that nothing there stays standing long, so the buildings are the newest in the city and the rents are the lowest. It is considered the poorest part of Vecia Sol. Crime is not something that happens often, but when it does it is in the Southwest. The patrician children of the city will often go there to drink where nobody knows them, a plan which might work if their faces weren’t paraded around the rest of the city.

No estate stands inside Old Town, as there is no room for grounds. Patricians have modest villas on the outer edges of the spokes; the three major houses each live about half an hour’s walk out from the edge of the city proper.

Culture

Nearly everyone in Vecia Sol works in an arts trade; every household will have someone who grinds pigment, sews cases, hauls, cleans a saleroom, pours drinks, or plays an instrument. Even those who never touch an art piece know roughly what things are worth and the city is full of laborers with opinions on all manner of pieces, most of them in disagreement with whatever a Marlowe said last.

Wine is local, cheap, and everywhere. Fish comes up from the southwest markets and is cheap and plentiful in the poorer quarters, though the best of it costs a great deal more by the time it has been carried up to the Garden. Food and wine that comes in via the eastern road is the expensive end of the table, and served accordingly.

Evenings in Vecia Sol are well-provided for, largely by the Katullins. Playhouses, wine halls, and gambling houses are common, and a plebeian with savings can afford a good night out at most of them. Troupes perform year-round, and the traveling ones pass through so regularly that the city is usually the first in Civen to see a new piece.

Forum debates are a spectacle as much as a civic function: they are free, outdoors, and draw crowds who have no stake in the outcome but several opinions to share about it afterward. A well-argued position is discussed amongst the populace in wine halls for weeks, while a badly-argued one is discussed even longer.

It is also, unofficially, the one of the easiest places in Civen for a plebeian to become patrician. Elevation is meant to reward public benefaction, and in a city that keeps such careful track of who funds what, devotion to the arts is very easy to prove.

Education

The Republic’s free primary schooling is available in Vecia Sol, as it is anywhere in Civen, and most children attend until they are ten. After that the city is nearly all apprenticeships. Septly clusters take very few, and those seeking military service will leave for Civenopolis.

What a child apprentices to at ten tends to settle the rest of their life, and the trades here are the ones the salerooms need: carving, gilding, framing, printing, appraisal. The best masters are selective about intake, and families with standing get their children placed through connection as much as coin. Children whose families have neither standing nor coin can spend years proving their hands are worth a master’s time. Many apprentice informally, running errands in a workshop and being tolerated there until someone notices they’re good.

Trade

Vecia Sol’s wealth is in art, wine, and fine goods, most of which arrive from the east. Its blacksmiths, who prospered enormously through a century of war and have found the peace less generous, sell a great deal of work to buyers who take it out along the eastern road towards Vlean. What comes back along the same road is wine, exotic foods, and the pieces that end up in the salerooms.

It is a matter of manners in the city to not question a piece of art’s origins or authenticity after a Marlowe has appraised it and the paperwork is in order. A guest may ask where a piece came from and will be told the dealer, the crate, and the year it arrived. A guest who continues to question the piece has made an error and will find over the following season that the smaller invitations stop arriving, their appraisals take longer, and no one volunteers any information on incoming pieces. A season or two of better manners generally repairs the faux pas. For a patrician this is an inconvenience; for a dealer’s clerk it is the end of a career.

The smiths are the exception to this rule. They are very proud of their work and will describe it in detail to anyone who asks.

Worship

Sept worship in Vecia Sol is ordinary Civen practice: scattered temples, no fixed schedule, invocation as the day requires. The city’s particular quarrel is over which of the Seven the arts belong to. Performers, poets, and the troupes hold for the Elemental. The appraisers, cataloguers, and scholars of provenance hold for the Scholar. The dispute is centuries old, will never be settled, and both sides would be disappointed if it were.

Officially there is no place of Draconus worship in Vecia Sol. There is, however, a modest marble dragon in the Garden, funded by the Valerius family, which sometimes finds offerings left at its base. Nobody has ever objected to this practice on the grounds that it is “just a statue”.

The Three Major Houses

The three major houses have held power in Vecia Sol as far back as most can remember, well before the Senate was established and the city began electing representatives.

In the distant past the Valerius and Katullin families were in open feud; duels in the streets between them were common enough that healers were kept on call for grievous injuries. The Marlowes came along and put a stop to it, though the details of what prompted the intervention or how they succeeded are lost to time.

Valerius

This house holds the west, facing Civenopolis. Their current head is known as the Baron, which has been his nickname since he was young. One of the Senate seats for Vecia Sol has been held by a Valerius for longer than anyone can say, and the city stopped finding it remarkable generations ago.

Valerius money comes from stone and sculpture, and they have funded most of the city’s public buildings. They broker rather than carve; large blocks of marble arrive in daylight with many people watching and go up in temples, on civic frontages, and in the Garden with the family name cut into the plinth. A century of that has left the city physically full of Valerius, which is one of several reasons they keep winning elections. Their clients—carvers, finishers, riggers, the men who build the cradles—are among the largest bodies of skilled tradesmen in the city, and they never miss a vote.

The Baron’s two elder children, Atticus and Dominus, are each missing an eye: Atticus the left and Dominus the right. This was plainly done to them and nobody has ever asked by whom, though most rumors point toward the Katullins.

What is said against them concerns the younger generation. The elder Valerius are unfailingly courteous about the other houses in public. The younger are not, and have been walked out of more than one party before they could finish what they were saying.

Marlowe

They hold the middle, which is why they have kept the Garden’s accounts since it was planted. Theirs is the legal trade: wills, contracts, dowry settlements, arbitration, and the appraisals all of it depends on. No estate is settled and no collection sold in Vecia Sol until a Marlowe has named its value and their fee.

When the Valerius and Katullin houses have business with one another, it frequently goes through Marlowe. Nobody necessarily arranged it that way; a Marlowe simply drew up the contract, or held the deposit, or named the price, and the two houses never had to share a room.

The house is run by Constance, the eldest of three sisters, who has signed for the family since her father’s death. The middle, Mary, married a Vane years ago and is at every party in the city; anyone wanting the family’s ear starts with her. The youngest, Alice, does the authentications. She is twenty-six, and dealers have been known to hold a sale until she is free.

What is said against them is that they are exceedingly careful. They take very few clients, on the grounds that a patron with too many serves none of them well. Those they take are looked after extremely well, and everyone else is left wondering what it takes to be chosen.

Katullin

This house holds the east, facing the road out towards Vlean. The current patriarch is Abraxus, a man getting on in age but no less sharp for it. They are generally well-liked, though in living memory not one of them has held office. Katullins often say, with great warmth, that the Valerius family handles the political side of things very well so they see no need to run against them.

Their money is in wine and in the scribal trades such as paper, ink, and presses. The family keeps playhouses, gambling halls, and wineries; the troupes, musicians, and courtesans who work in them are pledged to the house. The work is lucrative, and there is hardly a person in Vecia Sol who has not had a good evening somewhere that Katullin coin paid for.

In recent years the house has put money into Freelands trade. One granddaughter comes and goes frequently; the other founded a press there and married the Consul of the Freelands. Several people speculated the latter was a long game finally paying off—marrying his middle grandchild into the Marianus family did more for Abraxus Katullin’s political standing than anything money could have bought.

What is said against them is that a great deal about the house is not accounted for. They turn over indentured servants faster than anyone can explain, move more freight than wine and paper would seem to require, and keep more hired swords than a merchant family should need.