My grandfather has three children, and six grandchildren.

For quite some time, I was my grandfather's pet grandchild. Don't get me wrong, he loves all his grandchildren equally, but I was his first grandchild, and… Ok, I can't quite explain or qualify this. But I was.

And then, my cousin, Su, was born. This was when I was about 12, and firmly accustomed to being the cock of the walk. And I realized that my grandfather was talking about him all the time. And, of course, not quite realizing at the time that superannuation is in the nature of
things, I didn't like it at all. I liked Su, but I didn't like the fact that he existed, if that makes any sense.

I dealt with it, but it took me a long while.

Now Su has a brother, Vi. And when I went over to my grandparents' yesterday, everybody was clustered around Vi in the drawing room, and Su, I saw was sitting alone in the bedroom. No one noticed he wasn't around.

I could have told him it was going to happen eventually.

The worst thing about it is that I see his parents completely ignoring him. And it doesn't help that Vi is one of the cutest children I have ever seen. Everyone is in raptures over him.
I am no expert on family dynamics, but I realize that I am very lucky that after my sister was born, I still got a lot of time, from my Mom, my Dad, my grandparents, everyone. I was never made to feel completely overlooked.

And even though a few years ago, I quite desperately wanted the focus to shift away from Su, I would never have wished this on him.

Prologue: The City of Gold

The city was cold and dark. It was a thousand miles below the surface, where there was desert, and rock, and pitiless sun; and nothing else. Or so tradition said.

Far below the city in a chamber gouged out of the living rock sat a woman. She was clad in a shroud, and on her finger was the ring of the dead, the ring that was put on a person’s finger after death, just before the burial.

Though she was insulated from the city by an unspeakable weight of rock, she could see all that happened in every part of it. She was the spirit of the city.

The chamber she was in had no obvious source of light, and yet was diffusely illumined. She was on a slab of rock, the only thing the bare chamber contained. Above that slab was the opening of a long shaft, her one corporeal link with her city and its people. Along one side of the chamber was a sluggishly flowing stream- the blood of the city, it was called. The water was bitter, and dark- and always blood-warm. It was said that the stream would flow for as long as the spirit of the city remained within her chamber. And this water was the lifeblood of the city, and in its dark stream was what made the city prosperous, and her people rich: innumerable granules of gold that the stream brought from somewhere along its course in the rock.

The woman looked young, and her hair was long, and as black as a raven. As black, indeed, as the rock that surrounded her. But her hands were calloused and hard from constant contact with the rock.

There had been a spirit, for as long as the city had existed, imprisoned in that little bubble in the rock- and the city had existed for thousands of years. No one knew who had built the first tunnels, or indeed the last, since none of the tools the people of the city had now could make even a dent in that black rock. No one even knew if the ancestors of the people of the city had themselves hewed it out of the rock, or had found it empty and settled in it.

The city existed as a single tunnel, in a series of five rectangular spirals, one below the other, each turn of the great spiral tunnel connected to the ones above and the one below by shafts, which had rudimentary steps carved into them at intervals. And set along the walls of the tunnel were doors, which led to the chambers in which the people lived.

The end of the tunnel, at the termination of the last and lowest spiral was the Hall of the Dominus, the lord of the city, the master of much of the wealth the city contained. No one was allowed in that last chamber, without express permission, on pain of death. Because that is where the shaft connecting the spirit to the city opened, at the foot of the throne on which the Dominus sat. The walls of the hall were veined with gold, and there were torches all around, and guards who, it was said, never slept.

And so she waited, in her chamber alone, and tired. She watched the people of the city: their crowded marketplaces, the areas where they harvested the gold, the stifling, dangerous tunnels that connected them to other cities, much higher up, closer to the dangerous surface.
And sometimes she sang:
“In the city of gold, will be born the one,
Who will lead the child of man into the sun.”

It was an old couplet, part of the tradition of the city. Men said that it was an old wives tale. But the spirit knew what it meant, and she waited for the Golden One as time grew gnarled in the city of gold.