Trivia help needed
Jun. 5th, 2009 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cjk1701 posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
vorkosiganHi guys,
I'm working on a 3D rendering project of Vorbarr Sultana around the time of A Civil Campaign (gotta have something to procrastinate with when you're avoiding school work) and to begin with I'm collecting every little bit from the books that mention anything at all about the way the city and its buildings look. Here is what I have so far. Can you think of anyplace (or any book) I've missed?
Thanks in advance!
Barrayar
And here they were at the very palace in question. As an architectural pile, the Imperial Residence made Vorkosigan House look small. Sprawling wings rose two to four stories high, accented with sporadic towers. Additions of different ages crisscrossed each other to create both vast and intimate courts, some justly proportioned, some rather accidental-looking. The east facade was of the most uniform style, heavy with stone carving. The north side was more cut-up, interlocking with elaborate formal gardens. The west was the oldest, the south the newest construction
*
The view of the cityscape from this four-floors-up vantage was very fine. She could catch a gleam of the river that divided the town, beyond trees and buildings. Although the excavation of a large hole a few blocks away along the line of sight suggested that the riverine scene would be occluded soon by new architecture. The tallest turret of Vorhartung Castle, where she’d attended all those ceremonies in the Council of Counts’ chamber, peaked from a bluff overlooking the water.
Beyond Vorhartung Castle lay the oldest parts of the capital. She’d not yet seen that area, its kinked one-horse-wide streets impassable to groundcars, though she’d flown over the strange, low, dark blots in the heart of the city. The newer parts, glittering out toward the horizon, were more like galactic standard, patterned around the modern transportation systems.
None of it was like Beta Colony. Vorbarr Sultana was all spread out on the surface, or climbed skyward, strangely two-dimensional and exposed.
*
They stood in an alley deep in the maze of the caravanserai. A thick-walled building bulked an unusual three stories high in the cold, wet darkness. High on its stuccoed face, scabrous with peeling paint, yellow light glinted through carved shutters. An oil lamp burned dimly above a wooden door, the only entrance Cordelia could see.
*
The structure was multi-storied, in the utilitarian style of the building boom that had come on the heels of Ezar Vorbarra’s ascent to power and stability thirty-plus years ago.
The Warrior's Apprentice
Minute particles in their worn granite scintillated warmly in the autumn morning light, in spite of the industrial haze that hung over the capital city of Vorbarr Sultana. A racket from farther down the street marked where a similar mansion was being demolished to make way for a modern building. Miles glanced up to the high-rise directly across the street; a figure moved against the roofline. The battlements had changed, but the watchful soldiers still stalked along them.
*
Miles banked the lightflyer in a gentle, demure turn around Vorhartung Castle, resisting a nervous urge to slam it directly down into the courtyard. The ice had broken on the river winding through the capital city of Vorbarr Sultana, running a chill green now from the snows melting in the Dendarii Mountains far to the south. The ancient building straddled high bluffs; the lightflyer rocked in the updraft puffing from the river. The modern city spread out for kilometers around was bright and noisy with morning traffic. The parking areas near the castle were jammed with vehicles of all descriptions, and knots of men in half-a-hundred different liveries. Ivan, beside Miles, counted the banners snapping in the cold spring breeze on the battlements.
Mirror Dance
"How... cultural," said Mark warily, peering out through the canopy. Vorhartung Castle really looked like a castle, a rambling, antiquated pile of featureless stone rising out of the trees. It perched on a bluff above the river rapids that divided Vorbarr Sultana. Its grounds were now a park; beds of cultivated flowers grew where men and horses had once dragged siege engines through icy mud in vain assaults. "What is this really?"
*
They went to a place called the caravanserai, a stretched walking distance from Vorhartung Castle. Mark escaped another ground-car ride with Ivan by virtue of the narrowness of the streets—alleys—in the ancient district. The caravanserai itself was a curious study in Barrayaran social evolution. Its oldest core was cleaned up, renovated, and converted into a pleasant maze of shops, cafes, and small museums, frequented by a mixture of city workers seeking lunch and obvious provincial tourists, come up to the capital to do the historic shrines. This transformation had spread from the clusters of old government buildings like Vorhartung Castle along the river, toward the district's center; on the fringes to the south, the renovation petered out into the kind of shabby, faintly dangerous areas that had given the caravanserai its original risky reputation.
*
A shift in the architecture, from the low tan stucco of the first century of the Time of Isolation to the high red brick of its last century, marked the marches of the caravanserai proper, or improper.
*
Ivan swung by his apartment, which was in a tower in one of the city's better districts, not far from the entirely modern government buildings housing the Imperial Service Command headquarters.
Memory
The driver passed the security checkpoint and pulled through the gates to the massive gray building, vast and grim and foreboding. The impression was not all due to Miles s state of mind; ImpSec HQ was one of the ugliest buildings in Vorbarr Sultana. Tourists from the backcountry, who might otherwise have been expected to avoid the place, drove by just to look at it, in honor of the interesting reputation of the architect, whom legend had it had died insane after the abrupt eclipse of his patron Emperor Yuri. The driver took Miles past the daunting facade, and around to the discreet side entrance reserved for couriers, spies, informers, analysts, secretaries, janitors, and others with real business in the place.
*
The brisk walk had been a... nonevent. The streets of the central capital were thick with afternoon traffic and clogged with pedestrians, who hurried past on their various businesses, sparing barely a glance for the striding little man in military dress. [...] Three old-style mansions had once shared the city block. For security reasons the one on this end had been bought up by the Imperium during the period Miles's father had been Regent, and now housed some minor bureaucratic offices. The one on the other end, more dilapidated and with bad drains, had been torn down and replaced only by a little park. In their day, a century and a half ago, the great houses must have loomed magnificently over the horse-drawn carriages and riders clopping past. Now they were overshadowed by taller modern buildings across the street.
Vorkosigan House sat in the center, set off from the street by a narrow green strip of lawn and garden in the loop of the semicircular drive. A stone wall topped with black wrought-iron spikes surrounded it all. The four stories of great gray stone blocks, in two main wings plus some extra odd architectural bits, rose in a vast archaic mass. All it needed was window slits and a moat
*
Miles went out daily to ImpMil, the vast Imperial Service hospital complex, on the other side of the river gorge which bisected the Old Town.
*
An hour later, Miles strode through the graying morning to the side portal of ImpSec HQ. Clouds were blowing in from the east, chilling the promise of the early sun; he could smell rain in the air. The granite gargoyles looked blank and surly in the shadowless light. The building above them rose big and closed and blocky. And ugly.
A Civil Campaign
She set the ambiguities of the flesh abruptly aside as Vorbarr Sultana drew into view below. It was evening, and a glorious sunset painted the clouds as the shuttle made its final descent. City lights in the dusk made the groundscape magical. She could pick out dear, familiar landmarks, the winding river, a real river after a year of those measly fountains the Betans put in their underground world, the famous bridges—the folk song in four languages about them rippled through her mind—the main monorail lines... then the rush of landing, and the final whine to a true stop at the shuttleport.
*
Miles climbed from the old armored groundcar, and paused a moment on the flower-bordered curving walkway to stare enviously at René Vorbretten's entirely modern townhouse. Vorbretten House perched on the bluff overlooking the river, nearly opposite to Vorhartung Castle. Civil war as urban renewal: the creaky old fortified mansion which had formerly occupied the space had been so damaged in the Pretender's War that the previous Count and his son, when they'd returned to the city with Aral Vorkosigan's victorious forces, had decided to knock it flat and start over. In place of dank, forbidding, and defensively useless old stone walls, truly effective protection was now supplied by optional force-fields. The new mansion was light and open and airy, and took full advantage of the excellent views of the Vorbarr Sultana cityscape up and down stream. [...]
The Armsman brought Miles to the splendid sitting room with the window-wall looking across the Star Bridge toward the castle.
*
Miles gazed again at the magnificent view along the urbanized river valley. A few small boats chugged up and down the narrowing stream. In former eras, Vorbarr Sultana had been as far inland as navigation from the sea could get, as the rapids and falls here blocked further commercial transport. Since the end of the Time of Isolation, the dam and locks just upstream from the Star Bridge had been destroyed and rebuilt three times. Across from where they sat in Vorbretten House, Vorhartung Castle's crenellations loomed up through the spring-green treetops, gray and archaic.
*
A large, unmarked, shiny black aircar sat impressively wedged into a narrow area on the sidewalk, one corner crushing a small bed of marigolds, the other barely missing a sycamore tree. [...] The sergeant slid into the front compartment with the driver, and the vehicle lurched abruptly into the air, scattering a few leaves and twigs and bark shreds from the sycamore. The car spun away at high speed at an altitude reserved for emergency vehicles, passing a lot closer to the tops of buildings than Ekaterin was used to flying. [...]they arrived over Vorhartung Castle. The gardens around it were colorful and luxuriant with high summer growth; the river gleamed and burbled in the steep valley below. Counts' banners, indicating the Council was in session, snapped in bright rows on the battlements. [...]The parking lots and circles were all jammed. Armsmen in half a hundred different District liveries, brilliant as great birds, sat or leaned chatting among their vehicles. The ImpSec aircar came down neatly in a large, miraculously open space right by a side door.
I'm working on a 3D rendering project of Vorbarr Sultana around the time of A Civil Campaign (gotta have something to procrastinate with when you're avoiding school work) and to begin with I'm collecting every little bit from the books that mention anything at all about the way the city and its buildings look. Here is what I have so far. Can you think of anyplace (or any book) I've missed?
Thanks in advance!
Barrayar
And here they were at the very palace in question. As an architectural pile, the Imperial Residence made Vorkosigan House look small. Sprawling wings rose two to four stories high, accented with sporadic towers. Additions of different ages crisscrossed each other to create both vast and intimate courts, some justly proportioned, some rather accidental-looking. The east facade was of the most uniform style, heavy with stone carving. The north side was more cut-up, interlocking with elaborate formal gardens. The west was the oldest, the south the newest construction
*
The view of the cityscape from this four-floors-up vantage was very fine. She could catch a gleam of the river that divided the town, beyond trees and buildings. Although the excavation of a large hole a few blocks away along the line of sight suggested that the riverine scene would be occluded soon by new architecture. The tallest turret of Vorhartung Castle, where she’d attended all those ceremonies in the Council of Counts’ chamber, peaked from a bluff overlooking the water.
Beyond Vorhartung Castle lay the oldest parts of the capital. She’d not yet seen that area, its kinked one-horse-wide streets impassable to groundcars, though she’d flown over the strange, low, dark blots in the heart of the city. The newer parts, glittering out toward the horizon, were more like galactic standard, patterned around the modern transportation systems.
None of it was like Beta Colony. Vorbarr Sultana was all spread out on the surface, or climbed skyward, strangely two-dimensional and exposed.
*
They stood in an alley deep in the maze of the caravanserai. A thick-walled building bulked an unusual three stories high in the cold, wet darkness. High on its stuccoed face, scabrous with peeling paint, yellow light glinted through carved shutters. An oil lamp burned dimly above a wooden door, the only entrance Cordelia could see.
*
The structure was multi-storied, in the utilitarian style of the building boom that had come on the heels of Ezar Vorbarra’s ascent to power and stability thirty-plus years ago.
The Warrior's Apprentice
Minute particles in their worn granite scintillated warmly in the autumn morning light, in spite of the industrial haze that hung over the capital city of Vorbarr Sultana. A racket from farther down the street marked where a similar mansion was being demolished to make way for a modern building. Miles glanced up to the high-rise directly across the street; a figure moved against the roofline. The battlements had changed, but the watchful soldiers still stalked along them.
*
Miles banked the lightflyer in a gentle, demure turn around Vorhartung Castle, resisting a nervous urge to slam it directly down into the courtyard. The ice had broken on the river winding through the capital city of Vorbarr Sultana, running a chill green now from the snows melting in the Dendarii Mountains far to the south. The ancient building straddled high bluffs; the lightflyer rocked in the updraft puffing from the river. The modern city spread out for kilometers around was bright and noisy with morning traffic. The parking areas near the castle were jammed with vehicles of all descriptions, and knots of men in half-a-hundred different liveries. Ivan, beside Miles, counted the banners snapping in the cold spring breeze on the battlements.
Mirror Dance
"How... cultural," said Mark warily, peering out through the canopy. Vorhartung Castle really looked like a castle, a rambling, antiquated pile of featureless stone rising out of the trees. It perched on a bluff above the river rapids that divided Vorbarr Sultana. Its grounds were now a park; beds of cultivated flowers grew where men and horses had once dragged siege engines through icy mud in vain assaults. "What is this really?"
*
They went to a place called the caravanserai, a stretched walking distance from Vorhartung Castle. Mark escaped another ground-car ride with Ivan by virtue of the narrowness of the streets—alleys—in the ancient district. The caravanserai itself was a curious study in Barrayaran social evolution. Its oldest core was cleaned up, renovated, and converted into a pleasant maze of shops, cafes, and small museums, frequented by a mixture of city workers seeking lunch and obvious provincial tourists, come up to the capital to do the historic shrines. This transformation had spread from the clusters of old government buildings like Vorhartung Castle along the river, toward the district's center; on the fringes to the south, the renovation petered out into the kind of shabby, faintly dangerous areas that had given the caravanserai its original risky reputation.
*
A shift in the architecture, from the low tan stucco of the first century of the Time of Isolation to the high red brick of its last century, marked the marches of the caravanserai proper, or improper.
*
Ivan swung by his apartment, which was in a tower in one of the city's better districts, not far from the entirely modern government buildings housing the Imperial Service Command headquarters.
Memory
The driver passed the security checkpoint and pulled through the gates to the massive gray building, vast and grim and foreboding. The impression was not all due to Miles s state of mind; ImpSec HQ was one of the ugliest buildings in Vorbarr Sultana. Tourists from the backcountry, who might otherwise have been expected to avoid the place, drove by just to look at it, in honor of the interesting reputation of the architect, whom legend had it had died insane after the abrupt eclipse of his patron Emperor Yuri. The driver took Miles past the daunting facade, and around to the discreet side entrance reserved for couriers, spies, informers, analysts, secretaries, janitors, and others with real business in the place.
*
The brisk walk had been a... nonevent. The streets of the central capital were thick with afternoon traffic and clogged with pedestrians, who hurried past on their various businesses, sparing barely a glance for the striding little man in military dress. [...] Three old-style mansions had once shared the city block. For security reasons the one on this end had been bought up by the Imperium during the period Miles's father had been Regent, and now housed some minor bureaucratic offices. The one on the other end, more dilapidated and with bad drains, had been torn down and replaced only by a little park. In their day, a century and a half ago, the great houses must have loomed magnificently over the horse-drawn carriages and riders clopping past. Now they were overshadowed by taller modern buildings across the street.
Vorkosigan House sat in the center, set off from the street by a narrow green strip of lawn and garden in the loop of the semicircular drive. A stone wall topped with black wrought-iron spikes surrounded it all. The four stories of great gray stone blocks, in two main wings plus some extra odd architectural bits, rose in a vast archaic mass. All it needed was window slits and a moat
*
Miles went out daily to ImpMil, the vast Imperial Service hospital complex, on the other side of the river gorge which bisected the Old Town.
*
An hour later, Miles strode through the graying morning to the side portal of ImpSec HQ. Clouds were blowing in from the east, chilling the promise of the early sun; he could smell rain in the air. The granite gargoyles looked blank and surly in the shadowless light. The building above them rose big and closed and blocky. And ugly.
A Civil Campaign
She set the ambiguities of the flesh abruptly aside as Vorbarr Sultana drew into view below. It was evening, and a glorious sunset painted the clouds as the shuttle made its final descent. City lights in the dusk made the groundscape magical. She could pick out dear, familiar landmarks, the winding river, a real river after a year of those measly fountains the Betans put in their underground world, the famous bridges—the folk song in four languages about them rippled through her mind—the main monorail lines... then the rush of landing, and the final whine to a true stop at the shuttleport.
*
Miles climbed from the old armored groundcar, and paused a moment on the flower-bordered curving walkway to stare enviously at René Vorbretten's entirely modern townhouse. Vorbretten House perched on the bluff overlooking the river, nearly opposite to Vorhartung Castle. Civil war as urban renewal: the creaky old fortified mansion which had formerly occupied the space had been so damaged in the Pretender's War that the previous Count and his son, when they'd returned to the city with Aral Vorkosigan's victorious forces, had decided to knock it flat and start over. In place of dank, forbidding, and defensively useless old stone walls, truly effective protection was now supplied by optional force-fields. The new mansion was light and open and airy, and took full advantage of the excellent views of the Vorbarr Sultana cityscape up and down stream. [...]
The Armsman brought Miles to the splendid sitting room with the window-wall looking across the Star Bridge toward the castle.
*
Miles gazed again at the magnificent view along the urbanized river valley. A few small boats chugged up and down the narrowing stream. In former eras, Vorbarr Sultana had been as far inland as navigation from the sea could get, as the rapids and falls here blocked further commercial transport. Since the end of the Time of Isolation, the dam and locks just upstream from the Star Bridge had been destroyed and rebuilt three times. Across from where they sat in Vorbretten House, Vorhartung Castle's crenellations loomed up through the spring-green treetops, gray and archaic.
*
A large, unmarked, shiny black aircar sat impressively wedged into a narrow area on the sidewalk, one corner crushing a small bed of marigolds, the other barely missing a sycamore tree. [...] The sergeant slid into the front compartment with the driver, and the vehicle lurched abruptly into the air, scattering a few leaves and twigs and bark shreds from the sycamore. The car spun away at high speed at an altitude reserved for emergency vehicles, passing a lot closer to the tops of buildings than Ekaterin was used to flying. [...]they arrived over Vorhartung Castle. The gardens around it were colorful and luxuriant with high summer growth; the river gleamed and burbled in the steep valley below. Counts' banners, indicating the Council was in session, snapped in bright rows on the battlements. [...]The parking lots and circles were all jammed. Armsmen in half a hundred different District liveries, brilliant as great birds, sat or leaned chatting among their vehicles. The ImpSec aircar came down neatly in a large, miraculously open space right by a side door.
