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"I saw it! Ask anyone! ...except her. Don't ask her."
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"Polythreme is a city where some principle in the water or earth - they say - makes everything live. This makes it a hellish place. Candles scream as they burn. Furniture is enslaved wood. Buildings are hollow shells of misery. The Clay Men are sold by Polythreme - or perhaps they escape." "Everything's alive there, or so the story goes. Coal burns with a long low moan, steel is forged under protest, new-minted coins still shriek with pain and horror. It sounds a horribly callous place. Not to mention remarkably noisy."
Polythreme, the birthplace of the Clay Men, is a small island nation within the Sea of Voices.
HERE IS SCREAMING[]
"IN POLYTHREME THE BED I SLEPT ON WAS A SLAVE. THE ROOM WHERE I SLEPT WAS HACKED FROM SCREAMING STONE. THE WATER I DRANK BEGGED ME TO STOP. THEY PAID ME IN COIN THAT PLOTTED MY DOWNFALL. THE MEMORIES ARE TROUBLING. THIS PLACE IS BETTER."
A clothes-colony
Everything in Polythreme is suffused with an unnatural vitality. Coins scream, houses scream, and if you spend enough time there, even your clothes will come to life and start screaming. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see roaming colonies of clothing, banded together to wear a person instead of the other way around. It's very noisy in Polythreme, for obvious reasons. The Clay Men aren't very fond of this place (because of all the screaming), and they're eager to get their compatriots over to London as menial workers. Many of them are more than happy to spread stories of their homeland, preferably through the words of a well-respected Londoner.
Welcome to Me[]
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"I no longer love him. How could I, after what he had done to me? But his love abides, over the sea in London. I am his heart's desire."
The ruler of Polythreme is known as the King with a Hundred Hearts; he is thousands of years old and may have once been Enkidu (Gilgamesh's lover). This is a surprisingly fitting role for old Enkidu, who was created from clay and saliva from the goddess Aruru to stop Gilgamesh from terrorizing his subjects in Uruk. In short, he was quite literally the first Clay Man. However, in the world of Fallen London he was originally a human merchant from the East (presumably Ancient China).[1]
Very few are permitted an audience with the King, so naturally, his nature and appearance are something of a mystery. The King is best known for sending Clay Men to London as menial laborers who work for the Bazaar.
The King is a survivor of the First City (formerly Uruk or Tell Brak). The Manager of the Royal Bethlehem Hotel, who may or may not be Gilgamesh, agreed to sell the First City to save the King's life... but at a cost. The Masters, in their usual disregard for a mere human's feelings, took a piece of the The Mountain of Light and shoved it in the King's chest. This made the King very immortal, but also caused him to grow to the size of an island, and the fragment of Stone inside him has become the source of the island's unnatural vitality. The King with a Hundred Hearts is now a true (but giant) Clay Man, or otherwise an enormous statue, with diamond shards for hearts.