There is a particular quality to a day on which too many things happen simultaneously. It is not excitement, exactly, though it resembles it. It is not confusion, though it borders on it. It is the sensation of standing in the middle of a busy junction and realising that all the traffic, for once, is flowing in the same direction — and wondering, with the caution of a man who has been splashed before, how long that can possibly last.

Monday was such a day.

At half past nine in the morning, behind the heavy doors of the Foreign Office on Chancery Row, two men — one representing an empire that has moved warships into a strait, the other representing a city that needs copper to build a tramway — sat down to discuss the terms on which ships might once again carry cargo through waters that nations have been arguing over since before most of us were born. Seven hours later, they emerged with something resembling a plan, or at least the shape of one.

Thirty minutes after they sat down, and two streets away, the Mayor of Bobington stood up in the Municipal Chamber and spoke for the first time in twenty-two days. She spoke well. She spoke about workers and promises and the cost of doing nothing. And when she was finished, eleven members of the City Council voted unanimously to build a tramway — or rather, to build half a tramway now, and the other half when someone can tell them with confidence what lies beneath the mountains where the copper comes from.

The gallery applauded. The bond market rallied. Copper fell. The Eastern Spice Index fell. The man who sells mackerel futures on the Bramblegate Exchange — I do not know his name, but I have seen him through the window — loosened his collar, which is the closest he comes to celebration.

And at six o’clock that morning, before any of this had begun, Orna Vesely carried a crate of smoked fish into a market stall that had been closed for five days and said, to no one in particular, “The fish does not wait.”

She is right, of course. The fish does not wait. Nor does copper, nor does a man named Soren who has crossed a continent to sit in a room on Chancery Row, nor does an apprentice welder named Samuel Obi who is nineteen years old and has never held a full-time position and was, as of approximately 11:18 on Monday morning, promised that he will.

I have lived in this city long enough to know that a day when everything goes right is usually followed by a week when something goes wrong. The Kaelmar framework is a draft, not a treaty. The geological survey has not begun. The Ashcroft tax bill remains unpaid. The Bellvue Theatre needs sixty-five thousand florins by a deadline that grows nearer with every sunset. The Greymoor ridge is glowing, and no one can yet say whether it is a wonder or a warning.

But on Monday — on this particular Monday — the traffic flowed. The council spoke with one voice. The diplomats spoke with carefully chosen words, which in diplomacy amounts to the same thing. The fish was sold. The ferry ran. The market reopened under canvas, which is not the same as under a roof, but which is very much better than not reopening at all.

I walked home through Midtown in the early evening. The streetlamps were on — the gas ones on the older streets, the electric ones on the newer ones, a coexistence that Edmund Vale would have appreciated. A boy was selling the evening edition on the corner of Threadneedle Street, and the headline was about unanimity, which is a word that looks better in print than it usually sounds in practice.

I bought a copy. I tucked it under my arm. I walked home.

Some days, the city earns its name.