The Water Clock
The city has three months of water and four caliphs a year.
- ~95 min
- 20234 words
- 41 scenes
- 5 branch points
- 5 endings
- Al-Andalus, Córdoba, 1013 CE during the fitna
2 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · generated placeholder backgrounds and character art in-game · licensed music, credited in the build · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
Córdoba, 1013. Sahar bint Yusuf keeps the water — the qanats under the Sierra, the cisterns nobody has surveyed since her father died, and the great weight-driven clock at the bridge gate that is the only reason the city agrees on what time it is. She holds the sole complete map of the underground channels. Outside the walls, a Berber army has been sitting for a season, and its most competent officer has issued a written order not to break the aqueducts, because a city with water can be taxed and a city without water can only be burned. Inside the walls, the chancery keeps producing panegyrics. Ilyas ibn Rushayd has written accession poems for three caliphs in four years and is charming about it, and has loved Sahar since a quarrel over a sluice gate. Ghalib ibn Zayyan, on the north bank, wants her map and is willing to explain exactly what he will do with it. Then a partial survey of the water channels turns up in the besiegers' camp in handwriting Sahar has been reading love letters in for two years, and the word for what it is depends entirely on whether the city survives. A siege story about infrastructure, faith and desire, in a Córdoba being dismantled for its own building materials: brass, lead, water weight, ledger lines, a library being sold by the shelf. Three people who each have a defensible reason to betray the other two. Desire is written frankly and closes the door; violence arrives late and lands hard. Five endings — the city falls in all of them, and what differs is what she carries out and what she smashes first.
Content notice
- siege warfare, graphic violence
- massacre of civilians (offscreen and reported)
- sexual content implied, cuts away
- religious persecution
- torture referenced
- destruction of libraries and cultural property
- thirst and dehydration
Cast
- S Sahar bint Yusuf protagonist; keeper of Córdoba's water no portrait yet
- I Ilyas ibn Rushayd chancery secretary, poet to whoever is caliph this month no portrait yet
- G Ghalib ibn Zayyan Zanata officer commanding on the north bank no portrait yet
- H Hakam ibn Rushayd Ilyas's brother; officer of the city militia no portrait yet
- T The Wazir, Abu Marwan head of the chancery under three caliphs no portrait yet
- Z Zaynab the Cistern-Keeper Sahar's crew chief; forty years underground no portrait yet