A Storm of Wings v-2

by M. John Harrison

  'The world is not as we perceive it,'maintained the early converts, 'but infinitely more surprising. We must cultivate a diverse view.'This mild (even naive) truism, however, was to give way rapidly – via a series of secret and bloody heretical splits – to a more radical assertion. A wave of murders, mystifying to the population at large, swept the City. It was during this confused period that the Sign itself first came to light, that simple yet tortuous adaptation of the fortune teller's MANTIS symbol which, cut in steel or silver, swings at the neck of each adherent. Ostlers and merchant princess, soldiers and shopkeepers, astrologers and vagabonds, were discovered sprawled stiffly in the gutters and plazas, strangled in an unknown fashion and their bodies tattooed with symbolical patterns, as the entire council of the Sign, elected by secret ballot from the members of the original cabal, tore itself apart in a grotesque metaphysical dispute. A dreadful sense of immanence beset the City. 'Life is a blasphemy,'announced the Sign. 'Procreation is a blasphemy, for it replicates and fosters the human view of the universe.'

  Thus the Sign established itself; coming like a coded message from nowhere. Now its apologists range from wheelwright to Court ascetic; it is scrawled on every alley wall to fluoresce in the thin bluish moonlight; it rustles like a dry wind – or so it's said – even in the corridors of Methven's hall. Its complicated sub-sects, with their headless and apparently aimless structures, issue many bulletins. We counterfeit the 'real', they claim, by our very forward passage through time, and thus occlude the actual and essential. One old man feeding a dog might by the power of his spirit maintain the existence of an entire street – the dog, the shamble of houses with their big-armed women and staring children, the cobbles wet with an afternoon's rain, the sunset seen through the top of a ruined tower; and what mysteries lie behind this imperfect shadow-play? What truths? They process the streets impulsively, trying to defeat the Real, and hoping to come upon a Reborn Man.

  Such a procession now made its way toward the Bistro Californium, given up like a breath of malice by the night. It was quick and many-legged in the gloom. It was silent and unnerving. The faces which composed it were nacreous, curiously inexpressive as they yearned on long rubbery necks after their victim. Surprised among the Cispontine ruins not an hour before, this poor creature fled in fits and starts before them, falling in and out of doorways and sobbing in the white moonlight. A single set of running footsteps echoed in the dark. All else was a parched whisper, as if some enormous insect hovered thoughtfully above the chase on strong, chitinous wings.

  Since their condition allows them no deeper relief, the merely selfish are raddled with superstition; salt, mirror, 'touch wood'are ritual bribes, employed to ensure the approval of an already indulgent continuum. The true solepsist, however, has no need of such toys. His presiding superstition is himself. Galen Hornwrack, then, cared as much for the Sign of the Locust as he did for anything not directly connected with himself or his great loss: that is to say, not in the least. So the first clue to their coming confrontation went unrecognised by him – how could it be otherwise?

  Glued to its own feeble destiny in the leaden blue moonlight, the clique at the Bistro Californium regarded its navel with surprised disgust. Verdigris the poet was trying to raise money against the security of a ballad he said he was writing. He bobbed and hopped fruitlessly from shadow to harsh shadow, attempting first to cheat the fat Anax Hermax, epileptic second-son of an old Mingulay fish family, then a sleepy prostitute from Minnet-Saba who only smiled maternally at him, and finally Mooncarrot, who knew him of old. Mooncarrot laughed palely, his eyes focused elsewhere, and flapped his gloves. 'Oh dear, oh no, old friend,'he whispered murderously. 'Oh dear, oh no!'The words fell from his soft mouth one by one like pieces of pork. Verdigris was frantic. He plucked at Mooncarrots sleeve. 'But listen!'he said. He had nowhere to sleep; he had – it has to be admitted – debts too large to run away from; worse, he actually did feel verses crawling about somewhere in the back of his skull like maggots in a corpse, and he needed refuge from them in some woman or bottle. He nodded his head rapidly, shook that dyed fantastic crest of hair. 'But listen!'he begged; and, standing on one leg in a pool of weird moonlight, he put his hands behind his back, stretched his neck and recited,

  My dear when the grass rolls in tubular billows

  And the face of the ewe lamb bone white in the meadows

  Sickens and slithers down into the mallows

  Murder will soothe us and settle our fate;

  Hallowed and pillowed in the palm of tomorrow

  We tremble and trouble the hearts of the hollow:

  The teeth of the tigers that stalk in the shallows Encrimson the foam at the fisherman's feet!

  No-one paid him any attention. Hornwrack sat slumped at the edge of the room where he could keep an eye on both door and window (he expected nobody – it was a precaution – it was a habit), his long white hand curled round the handle of a black jug, a smile neglected on his thin lips. Though he loathed and mistrusted Verdigris he was faintly amused by this characteristic display. The poet now choked on his horrid extemporary, mid-line. He was becoming exhausted, staring about like a bullock in an abattoir, moving here and there in little indecisive runs beneath the strange Californium frescoes. Only Hornwrack and Chorica nam Veil Ban were left to importune; he hesitated then turned to the woman, with her pinched face and remote eyes. She will give him nothing, thought Hornwrack. Then we shall see how badly off he really is.

  'I dined with the hertis-Padnas,'she explained confidentially, not looking at Verdisgris as he bobbed uxoriously about in front of her. 'They were too kind.'She seemed to see him for the first time and her imbecile smile opened like a flower.

  'Muck and filth!'screamed Verdigris. 'I didn't ask for a social calendar!'

  Shivering, he forced himself to face Hornwrack.

  A grey shadow materialized behind him at the door and wavered there like some old worn lethal dream.

  Hornwrack flung his chair back against the wall and fumbled for his plain steel knife. (Moonlight trickled down its blade and dripped from his wrist.) Verdigris, who had not seen the shadow in the doorway, gaped at him in grotesque surprise. 'No, Hornwrack,'he said. His tongue, like a little purple lizard, came out and scuttled round his lips. 'Please. I only wanted -'

  'Get out of my way,'Hornwrack told him. 'Go on.'

  Scarlet crest shaking with relief, he gave a great desperate 'shout of laughter and sprang away in time to give Hornwrack one good look at the figure which now tottered through the door.

  A thin skin only, taut as a drumhead, separates us from the future: events leak through it reluctantly, with a faint buzzing sound, if they make any noise at all – like the wind in an empty house before rain. Much later, when an irreversible process of change had hold of them both, he was to learn her name – Fay Glass, of the House of Sleth, famous thousand and more years ago for its unimaginably oblique acts of cruelty and compassion. But for now she was a mere taint echo of the yet-to-occur, a Reborn Woman with eyes of a fearful honesty, haphazardly cropped hair an astonishing lemon colour, and a carriage awkward to the point of ugliness and absurdity (as if she had forgotten, or somehow never learned, how a human-being stands). Her knees and elbows made odd and painful angles beneath the thick 'velvet cloak she wore; her thin fingers clutched some object wrapped in waterproof cloth and tied up with a bit of coloured leather. Muddy and travel stained, there she stood, in an attitude of confusion and fear, blinking at Hornwrack's knife proferred like a sliver of midnight and true murder in the eccentric Californium shadows; at Verdigris'disgusting red crest; at Mooncarrot and his kid gloves, smiling and whispering delightedly, 'Hello my dear. Hello my little damp parsnip -'

  'I,'she said. She fell down like a heap of sticks.

  Verdigris was on her at once, slashing open the bundle even as her fingers relaxed.

  'What's this?'he muttered to himself. 'No money! No money!'With a sob he threw it high into the air. It turned over once or twic
e, landed with a thud, and rolled into a corner.

  Hornwrack went up and kicked him off. 'Go home and rot, Verdigris.'He gazed down thoughtfully.

  Perhaps a decade after the successful conclusion of the War of the Two Queens it had become apparent that a large proportion of the Reborn could not manage the continual effort neccessary to separate their dreams, their memories and the irrevocable present in which they now discovered themselves. Some illness or dislocation had visited them during the long burial. No more, it was decided, should be resurrected until the others had found a cure for this disability. In the interim the worst afflicted would leave the City to form communes and self-help groups dotted across the uplands and along the littorals of the depopulated North. It was a callous and unsatisfactory solution, except to those who felt most threatened by the Reborn; ramshackle and interim as it was, however, it endured – and here we find them seventy years on, in deserted estuaries full of upturned fishing boats and hungry gulls, under fretted fantastic gritstone edges and all along the verges of the Great Brown Waste – curious, flourishing, hermetic little colonies, some dedicated to music or mathematics, others to weaving and the related arts, others still to the carving of enormous mazes out of the sodden clinker and blowing sands of the Waste. All practise, besides, some form of the ecstatic dancing first witnessed by Tomb the Dwarf in the Great Brain Chamber at Knarr in the Lesser Rust Desert.

  The search for a cure is forgotten; the attempt to come to terms with Evening abandoned. They prefer now to drift, to surrender themselves to the currents of that peculiar shifting interface between past, present and wholly imaginary: acting out partial memories of the Afternoon and weaving into them whatever fragments of the Evening they are able to perceive. Privately they call this twilight country of perception 'the margins'; and some believe that by committing themselves wholly to it they will in the end achieve not only a complete liberation from linear time but also some vast indescribable affinity with the very fabric of the 'real'. They are mad, to all intents and purposes: but perfectly hospitable.

  From one of these communities Fav Glass had come, down all the long miles to the south. The 'weird filaments of silver threading the grey velvet of her cloak; her inability to articulate; her palpable confusion and petit mal: all spoke eloquently of her origins. But there was nothing to explain what had brought her here, or why she had failed to contact the Reborn of the City (who without exception – full of guilt perhaps over their abandonment of their cousins – would have feted and cared for her as they did every visitor from the North); nothing to account for her present pitiable condition. Hornwrack touched her gently with the toe of his boot. 'Lady?'he said absently. He did not precisely 'care'-he was, after all, incapable of that; but the night had surprised him, preseintiing him with a face he had never seen (or wanted to see) before: his curiosity had been piqued for the first time in many years.

  The City caught its breath; the blue hollow lunar glow, streetlight of some necrotic, alternate Viriconium, flickered; and when at last something prompted him to look up again, the servants of the Sign were before him, filing in dumb processional through the chromium Californium door.

  Chorica nam VeIl Ban left her table hurriedly and went to sit beside Lord Mooncarrot, whom she loathed. Her shoulders were as thin as a coat-hanger and from the folds of her purple dress there fluttered like exotic moths old invita tion cards with deckled edges and embossed silver script. Mooncarrot for his part dropped both his rancid smile and his yellow gloves – plop! – and now found himself too rigid to pick them up again. Under the table these two fumbled for one another's shaking hands, to clasp them in a tetanus of anxiety and self-interest while their lips curled with mutual distaste and their curdled whispers trickled across the room.

  'Hornwrack, take care!'

  (Much later he was to realise that even this simple counsel was enmeshed in incidental entendres. Not that it matters: at the time it was already too late to follow.)

  'Take care, Hornwrack!'advised a voice of wet rags and bile; a voice which had plumbed the gutters of its youth for inspiration and never clambered out again. It was Verdigris, sidling up behind him to hop and shuffle like a demented flamingo at the edge of vision. What abrupt desperate betrayal was he nerving himself up for? What unforgivable retreat? 'Oh, go away,'said Hornwrack. He felt like a man at the edge of some crumbling sea-cliff, his back to the drop and the unknown waves with the foam in their teeth. 'What do you want here?'he asked the servants of the Sign.

  By day they were drapers, dull and dishonest: by day they were bakers. Now, avid-eyed, as hollow and expectant as a vacuum, they stood in a line regarding the woman at his feet with a kind of damp, empty longing, their faces lumpen and ill-formed in the hideous light – moulded, it seemed, from some impure or desecrated white wax – weaving about on long thin necks, grunting and squinting in a manner halfapologetic, half-aggressive. Their spokesman, their priest or tormentor, was a beggar with the ravaged yellow mask of a saint. A surviving member of the original cabal, he wielded extensive financial power though he lived on the charity of certain important Houses of the City. A rich bohemian in his youth, he had refuted the ultimate reality even of the self (staggering, after nights of witty and irreproachable polemic, down the ashen streets at dawn, afraid to destroy himself lest by that he should somehow acknowledge that he had lived). He no longer interpreted but rather embodied the Sign, and when he stood forward and began to work his reluctant jaws back and forth, it spoke out of him.

  'You do not exist,'it said, in a voice like a starving imbecile, articulating slowly and carefully, as if speech were a new invention, a new unlooked-for interruption of the endless reedy Song. 'You are dreaming each other.'It pointed to the woman. 'She is dreaming you all. Give her up.'It swallowed dryly, clicking its lips, and became still.

  Before Hornwrack could reply, Verdigris – who, filled by circumstance with a bilious and lethal despair, had indeed been nerving himself up, although not for a betrayal -stepped unexpectedly out of the shadows. He had had a bad afternoon at the cards with Fat Main Etteilla; verse was scraping away at the wards of his skull like a picklock in a rusty keyhole; he was a rag of a man, in horror of himself and everything else that lived. To the spokesman of the Sign he offered a ridiculous little bow. 'Pigs are dreaming you, you tit-suckers!'he sneered; and, squawking like a drunken juggler, winked up at Hornwrack.

  Hornwrack was astonished.

  'Verdigris, are you mad?'

  'You're done for, at least!'was all the poet said. 'It's black murder now.'A perverted grin crossed his face. 'Unless -Suddenly he extended a dirty avaricious claw, palm upwards, calloused and ink-stained from the pen. 'If you want her you'll have to pay for her, Hornwrack!'he hissed. 'You can't fight them on your own.'He glanced sideways at the Sign, shuddered. 'Those eyes!'he whispered. 'Quick,'he said, 'before my guts turn to prune juice. Enough for a bed, enough for a bottle and I'm your man! Eh?'As he watched Hornwrack's incomprehension dissolve into disgust, he shivered and sobbed. 'You can't fight them on your own!'

  Hornwrack looked at him. He looked down at Fay Glass, insensible yet invested – a mysterious engine of fate. He looked at the spokesman of the Sign. He shrugged.

  'Peddle your knife somewhere else,'he told the poet. 'These people have never had cause to quarrel with me. They should remember that. They have made a simple mistake in the identity of this unfortunate woman (who is a cousin of mine, I now see, from Soubridge), and they are leaving.'

  He stood there feeling surprised. He had meant to say something else.

  'You do not exist,'whispered the Sign. Ansel Verdigris chuckled.

  Shadows flickered on the wall. Knives were out in the eerie light.

  'Oh very well,'sighed Galen Hornwrack. 'Very well'

  Possessed by the sudden instinctive cannibalism of the baboon (our unshakeable mahout, seated in the skull these million centuries) the combatants throw themselves at one another: the flesh parting like lips, wounds opening like avid mou
ths, precious fluids of the heart spent in one quick salivation; the bloody flux…

  Hornwrack watches at the celebration of his own genius, helpless and a little awed. He has done nothing during his self-imposed exile from humanity if not learn his trade. A cold, manufactured rage, counterfeit of an emotion without which he cannot do his work, laps him round. The good steei knife, conjured from its sheath like a memory, settles comfortably in his hand. He can no longer influence himself, and treads the measures of his trade – the cut, the leap, the feint. Like ajuggler in the Atteline Plaza he tumbles to avoid the despairing counterstroke (the blade whickering in beneath his cheekbone, the displaced air brushing feather-like his hollowed cheek). Blood fountains in the mad Californium light, the colour of old plums. That is no new colour. (All the while the girl lay between his shuffling feet like a stone, her eyes full of pain and disbelief.) The knife goes home, and goes home again in the queasy gloom. His blood is now inextricably mixed with that of the Sign, daubed on his bare forearms, greasy underfoot, a fraternity of murder and pain…

  (Somewhere behind him Verdigris was struggling, his face luminous with terror, his mouth a gargoyle's spouting a filth of verses, some drainpipe lyric of relaxing sphincters and glazed eyes. 'Remember this, Hornwrack!'he shouted. 'Remember this!'

  Hornwrack never heard him.) Three, perhaps four, fall before him, and then the mouthpiece of the Sign squeezes into view from the bloody melee like a face surfacing from the bottom of a dream – long, yellow, smeared with blood, triangular and expressionless as a wasp's – the breath huffing in and out like dry inhalations of some machine, the breath of the insect whispering the deadly symbolic secrets of the cabal, the arid rustling visions of bone and desert – until Hornwrack's knife thumps him squarely in the hollow between collarbone and trapezoid with a sound like a chisel in a block of wood, to end eighty years of fear and doubt. At the point of his death, electricity flares between them, as it the whole cabal gave up its heart in the one despairing, vomited word which was simultaneously his warning and his triumph.