Dorotea is a walled city of nine trading districts, said to lie “right in the middle of Terra and Antiterra” and to be generated by each visitor according to their desires. Some accounts describe it as a dragon.
| Type | Place (city) |
| Spanish entry | Dorotea |
Description
Four towers flank a drawbridge over the well that feeds four green canals; seven gates give passage. The canals divide the city into nine districts of three hundred houses and seven hundred chimneys each. The towers’ material is disputed: aluminum in the oldest reading, marble or alabaster in later copies.
Each district monopolizes a good, and the nine ruling families trade among themselves: bergamots, sturgeon roe, astrolabes, amethysts. Marriage follows the same circuit (“the married girls of each district marry young men of other districts”), and from it come the nine chiefs. A strict credit law holds: no one goes more than a week without receiving the installment owed.
At the center are an amphitheater, a market, performers’ platforms, and an execution arena with nine podiums plus a main one, partly “floating on the lake”, where a huge hooded executioner officiates.
Religion
There are altars to harvest goddesses. Three martyr saints, Dorotea, Cristo and Calixta, are patrons of florists, brewers, newlyweds and midwives. The church of Apollo was uprooted by an unnamed occupier, and the inhabitants formally ask whether freedom of worship will continue.
History
Felipe, who arrived twenty-five or thirty years ago with a camel caravan, saw the future rulers younger, acting on a platform: “those who used to be clowns, half soldiers, are now almost rulers, the people’s chosen.”
A war was fought over Dorotea, and the dragons of paradise proclaim it “an embassy of hell” and its people “sinners of the first hour”. Once “the city was a great archive”; now four of the nine districts are “paranoid, drained of blood”, and the towers are thought to be in bad shape. It is said to have been redeemed, as has “already happened in two other cities of the cycle”.
Travel
It is reached by land or by river, about a week by water. Four rivers cross it, named differently by guides and in papers (Lethe, Styx, Leteo, Phlegethon).
Conflicting accounts
- Rulers: nine chiefs, the district families; or three elected rulers in rotation, “the Aryan, the Maristo and the Wimborg”; or seven, “an alba, an elf, a dwarf and a murid. And Mimborgue, a maristo and an alien”, called “three bards who are now rulers”.
- City or dragon: three testimonies call Dorotea a city; others describe “a translucent white dragon” at its center, even a mount, and walking “on the body of Dorotea”.
Open questions
- Whether the dragon is the city’s manifestation, a distinct entity, or a slip of the teller.
- Which good belongs to each district, and which districts are drained of blood.
- What the great archive was; who the occupier is; whether the two river lists match.
- The order of the redemption, the war and the dragons’ judgment.
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