A Storm of Wings v-2

by M. John Harrison

  Hornwrack supported the corpse by its throat, struggling to pull out his knife. The yellow face grinned at him, laved by its own punctured carotid. He let it slip away, back down into his nightmares.

  For a moment he felt quite old and hopeless. All around him shadows were slipping from the place in defeat -silently, like sapient grey baboons quitting some foggy midnight rock in a warmer latitude, fur blood-streaked, the game up. In the middle of the room Verdigris had fallen to his knees and, clutching one gory thigh to stem the bleeding, was slashing feebly at retreating hamstrings. As Hornwrack watched he fell on his face and dragged himself off into a corner. Hornwrack ran out into the street, shouting. Brought up short by the dazzle of moonlight, he could hear only the rapid patter of feet. He stood there for a long time, shaking his head puzzledly, growing cold as the clock moved from midnight to one, the knife forgotten in his hand; then he went back inside.

  Verdigris had gone, through the rear entrance and out into the thousand gutters'of the Quarter, the girl's bundle with him; even now he would be trying to sell it in some derelict shambles at the dark end of an alley. Mooncarrot and Chorica nam Vell Ban were gone, to spend the rest of the night together in grey, narcissistic embrace, each seeing in the other's unresponsive face a mirror – and part with revulsion as the spasm of fear which had briefly united them faded in the spreading light of dawn. The Sign had gone, and its dead with it. The queer Californium frescoes looked down on an empty and echoing space, and, standing awkwardly at the hub of it, staring about her in characteristic frozen panic, the Reborn Woman Fay Glass, a harbinger, a messenger in a velvet cloak. Her cropped yellow hair was spiky with congealing blood and she was trying desperately to speak.

  . 'I,'she said. 'In my youth,'she whispered. Her eyes were blue as acid.

  'Look,'he told her, 'you had better leave before they come back.'A place in his left side ached unbearably. He felt dull '. and fatigued. 'I'm sorry about the bundle,'he said. 'If I see Verdigris… but I expect your people can help you.'He put his hand through the rip in his soft leather shirt. It came out warm and sticky. He bit his knuckles. 'I'm hurt,'he explained, 'and I can't help you any more. '

  'In my youth I – '

  She was plainly mad (and attracted madness too, focusing all the long lunacies of the City like a glass catching the rays of some ironic invisible sun). He wanted no dependants. He put out a hand to touch her shoulder.

  Immediately he experienced a shocking moment of blankness, a lapse like the premature tumble into sleep of an overtired brain. It was accompanied by something which resembled an intense flash of light. He heard himself say, quite inexplicably: 'There are no longer any walls.'Shadows rushed out of the Californium corners and swallowed him: the Afternoon was vibrating in him like a malign chord. Somewhere out there in the millenial dark night, tall ancient towers howled on a rising wind. He approached them over many days, fearfully, across tracts of moorland and dissected peat, scoured ridges and deep sumps. The 'water was corrupted and undrinkable, the paths difficult to find. Finally the hidden city composed itself before him like a dream, but by then it was too late… Simultaneously (in a vision overlaid like delicately coloured glass) he was in some other place. A settlement huddled on the verge of the Great Brown Waste. Behind it steep slopes covered with sickly dwarf-oak swept up to an extensive gritstone escarpment running north and south, its black bays and buttresses looming up against the fading light. A few flakes of snow hung in the bitter air: and, silhouetted against the pale-green sky, enormous insectile shapes marched in slow processions across the clifftop.

  'No,'cried Galen Hornwrack. He shook himself like a dying rat and pushed the woman away. 'What?'he said, staring at her. He was trembling all over. Then, with his hand clapped to his left side and his face haggard, he staggered out of the Californium, feeling the dry, febrile touch of wings or madness on his skin.

  Behind him the Reborn Woman moved her lips desperately, a child making faces into a mirror.

  'In my youth,'she said to his retreating back, 'I made my small contribution. Venice becomes like Blackpool, leaving nothing for anybody. Rebellion is good and necessary. I -'The Californium became silent about her. There was nothing left but the doorway, a trapezium of blue and grey and faded gamboge – the reflection of the City in a deep well of moonlight on an autumn night. Nothing was left but the wind out of Monar, a little blood, the falling leaves. She began to weep with frustration.

  'I-'.

  Viriconium. Hornwrack. Three worlds colliding in his head. As he rain aimlessly up and down the alleyways at the periphery of the Quarter, dark, viscid peat groughs yawned like traps beneath his feet. The wind hissed in his ears. Looming against an electric sky, that terrible haunted crag with its slow purposeful visitation! In the shattered moonlight of the City he stumbled into doors and walls, his limbs jerking erratically as if the vision accidentally vouchsafed him had been accompanied by some injection of poison into his nervous system. His clothes were torn and he was caked with blood; he couldn't remember where he lived; he couldn't imagine where he'd been. It was this fatal disorientation which camouflaged the sound of footsteps following him: and by the time he had remembered who he was – by the time those other landscapes had faded sufficiently for him to appreciate his situation – it was too late.

  Out of the shadows that curtained the alley wall another shadow hurled itself; across a band of moonlight a white perverted face was launched at his own; he was carried to the floor by a tremendous blow in his damaged side, as if someone had run full-tilt into him in the bruised yellow gloom. Thin, hispid arms embraced him, and close to his ear a voice that smelt of wet rags and bile – a voice pulped by self-indulgence and curdled with vice – hissed, 'Pay up, Hornwrack, or you'll rot in the gutter! I swear it!'

  The hands which now scuttled over him were lean and fearful, full of horrible vitality. They discovered his purse and emptied it. They stumbled on his knife; retreated in confusion; then snatched it up and drove it repeatedly against the flagstones until it shattered. Overcome by this ambitious tactic they abandoned him suddenly, like frightened rats. Something heavy and foul was flung down on the pavement near his head. A single exotic shriek of laughter split the night: running footsteps, the signature of the Low City, faded into echoes, stranding him sick and helpless on this barren, reeling promontory of his empty life.

  Now he realised that he had been stabbed a second time, close to the original wound. He grinned painfully at the ironical shards of his own blade, winking up at him from the cracked flags, each one containing a'tiny, perfect reflection of the mad retreating figure of the balladeer, coxcomb flapping in the homicidal night. 'I'll have your lights, you bloody cockatoo, you rag,'he whispered, 'you bloody poet!'But now he wanted only his familiar quarters in the Rue Sepile, the dry rustle of mice among the dead geraniums and the murmured confidences of the whores on the upper stair.

  After a while this hallucination of security became so magnetic that he hauled himself to his feet and began the journey, clinging to the alley wall for comfort. Almost immediately he was enveloped in a foul reek. He had stumbled over Verdigris'abandoned rubbish: the Reborn Woman's bundle, still wrapped in its waterproof cloth. For the life of him he couldn't think why it should stink so of rotting cabbage.

  When he unwrapped it to find out he discovered the hacked-off head of an insect, rotting and seeping and fully eighteen inches from eye to globular eye.

  He dropped it with a groan and fled, through the warrens behind Delphin Square, past the grubby silent booth of Fat Main Etteilla and the crumbling cornices of the Camine Auriale, his feet echoing down the empty colonnades, his wounds aching in the cold. Things pass behind me when my head is turned, he thought, and he knew then that the future was stalking him; that a consummation lay in ambush. He stared wildly up at the Name Stars in case they should reflect the huge unnatural change below. From Delphin all the way to the Plaza of Unrealized Time he went, straight as an arrow across the Artists'Quarter to the nar
row opening of the Rue Sepile, to those worm-eaten rooms on the lower landing with the ceilings that creaked all night…

  … Where the dawn found him out at last and his eighty year exile ended (although he was not to know that at the time).

  All night he had lain in a painful daze broken by short violent dreams and fevers in which he received hints and rumours of the World's end. Fire shot from the ruined observatory at Alves, and a great bell tolled where none had hung for millenia. A woman with an insect's head stuffed his wounds with sand; later, she led him through unfamiliar colonnades scoured by a hot dry wind – the streets crackled underfoot, carpeted with dying yellow locusts! Main Etteilla, sweating in the prophetic booth – 'Fear death from the air!'- opened her hands palm upwards and placed them on the table. He was abandoned by his companions in the deep wastes and crawled about groaning while the Earth flew apart like an old bronze flywheel under the wan eye of a moon which resolved itself finally into the face of his boy, impassive in the queasy light of a single candle.

  'What, then?'he whispered, trying to push the lad away.

  It was the last hour of the night, when the light creeps up between the shutters and spreads across the damp plaster like a stain, musty and cold. Outside, the Rue Sepile lay exhausted, prostrate, smelling of stale wine. He coughed and sat up, the sheets beneath him stiff with his own coagulating blood. Pulling himself, hand over hand, out of the hole of sleep, he found his mouth dry and rancid, his injured side a hollow pod of pain.

  'There are people to see you,'said the boy. And, indeed, behind his expressionless face other faces swam, there in the corner beyond the candlelight. Hornwrack shuddered, clawing at the bloody linen.

  'Do nothing,'he croaked.

  The boy smiled and touched his arm, with 'Better get up my lord,'the gesture ambivalent, the smile holding compassion perhaps, perhaps contempt; affection or embarrassment. They knew nothing about one another despite a hundred mornings like this, years of stiff and bloody sheets, delirium, hot water and the stitching needle. How many wounds had the boy bound, with pinched face and capable undemonstrative fingers? How many days had he spent alone with the dry smell of the geraniums, the Rue Sepile 'buzzing beyond the shutters, waiting to hear of a death?

  'Better get up. '

  'Will you remember me?'

  He shivered, and his hand found the boy's thin shoulder. 'Will you remember me?'he repeated, and when no answer was forthcoming swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

  'I'm coming,'he said with a shrug; so they waited for him in the shadows of his room, silent and attentive as the boy bathed and dressed his wounds, as the candle faded and grey light crept in under the door. Fay Glass the madwoman with her message from the North; Alstath Fulthor, lord of the Reborn and a great power in Viriconium since the War of the Two Queens; and between them the old bent man in the hooded robe, who peered out through a chink in the mouldy shutter and said dryly, 'I can connect nothing with nothing today. But look how the leaves fall!'

  3: A Fish Eagle in Viriconium

  Tomb the Dwarf's return to Viriconium, his adoptive city, was accomplished at no great pace. The passage of two or three days placed the site of his abortive excavations and near-incineration behind him to the south-east. The Monar massif was on his right hand (its peaks as yet no more than a threat of ice, a white hanging frieze hardly distinguishable from a line of cloud), while somewhere off to his left ran that ancient, paved and – above all – crowded way which links the Pastel City with its eastern dependencies – Faldich, Cladich and Lendalfoot by the sea. This latter route he avoided, preferring the old drove-roads and greenways, out of sentimentality rather than any conscious desire to be alone. He remembered something about them from his youth. Although he was not quite sure what it might be, he sought it stubbornly in the aimless salients and gentle swells of the dissected limestone uplands which skirt the mountains proper, haunted by the liquid bubble of the curlew and the hiss of the wind in the blue moor-grass.

  He gave little thought to his rescuer from the past. The man had vanished again while he slept, leaving nothing but a half-dream in which the words 'Viriconium'and 'Moon'were repeated many times and with a certain sense of urgency. (Tomb had woken ravenous in the morning, abandoned the new pit immediately, despite its promise, and gone in search of him – full at first of a curious joy, then at least in hope; and finally when he failed to find so much as a footprint in the newly-turned earth, with a wry amusement at his own folly.) He was, as he had put it more than once, a dwarf and not a philosopher. Events involved him utterly; he encountered them with optimism and countered them with instinct; in their wake he had few opinions, only memories. He asked for no explanations.

  Still, curiosity was by no means dead in him; and since he could not go to the Moon he moved west across the uplands instead, toward Viriconium, In a region of winding dales a further queer event overtook him.

  Fissuring the high plateau, so that from above it looked like a grey and eroded cheese, these deep little dry-bottomed valleys were dreamy and untenanted. Hanging thickets of thorn and ash made them difficult of access (except where some greenway deserted impulsively its grassy sheep-run to follow an empty stream bed, plunge through tumbled and overgrown intake walls, and nose like a dog among the mossy ruins of some long-abandoned village): and each was guarded by high, white, limestone bastions. Into one such came the dwarf at the end of a warmish October afternoon, the wheels of his caravan creaking on a disused track drifted with ochre leaves. Reluctant to disturb the elegant silence of the beechwoods, he descended slowly, looking for a place to pass the night. The air was warm, the valley dappled with honey-coloured light. Summer still lived here in the smell of the wild garlic, the dance of the insects in the steep glades, and the slow fall of a leaf through a slanting ray of sun.

  The curves of the track revealed to him first a forgotten hamlet in the valley floor – then, swimming above that in a kind of amber glow, the enormous cliff which dominated it.

  The village was long dead. Past it once had flowed a stream called the Cressbrook: but there was no-one left now to call it anything, and it had retreated shyly underground leaving only a barren strip of stones to separate the relics of human architecture from the vast limestone cathedral on its far bank. There was no water for his ponies, but Tomb turned them out of their shafts anyway; he felt magnetized, drawn, on the verge of some discovery. For this they bore him no more or less ill-will than usual, and he could hear them tearing at the damp grass as he pottered along the bank of the vanished brook. But he couldn't get comfortable 'there, or amid the contorted and lichenous boughs of the reverted orchard with its minute sour apples – and after a while he shook his head, staring puzzledly about him. Something had attracted him, and yet the place was nothing more than a collection of bramble-filled intakes, grassy mounds, and heaps of stone colonized by nettle and elderberry, its air of desuetude and loss magnified by the existence of the cliff above -That cliff! That aching expanse of stone, with its ancient jackdaw colonies, its great ragged swathes of ivy and its long mysterious yellow stains! It hung up there, every line of it precise in the amber glow, every scalloped overhang thick with brown darkness, every leaning ash tree, golden and exact against its own black shadow. Every buttress was luminous. The gloomy and suggestive caves worn in its face by a million years of running water seemed more likely places of habitude than the pitiful handful of relics facing it across the dry stream: the shadow of a bird, flickering for a moment across an acre of vibrant white stone, invested it with some immemorial yet transitory significance (some distillation or heirloom of a thousand twilights, a billion such shadows fossilized impalpably in the rock): it was like a vast old head – imperial, ironic and compelling -Eventually he cooked himself a meal and ate it squatting comfortably on the step of the caravan. Smoke from his fire became trapped in the inversion layers and drifted down the little valley. Evening came closer and yet never seemed to arrive – as if the valley and its great white guardian
were removed from the ordinary passage of time. The sun dipped forever into the greyness and yet never sank. The air cooled, but so slowly. No wind came. Tomb the Dwarf scratched his crotch, yawned. He stood up to massage the deep ache of an old back-wound.

  He fed the ponies. Then he went to look at the cliff.

  At first, a little out of breath after the ascent of the vegetated scree beneath, he was content merely to stand at the bottom of it and crane his neck to watch the jackdaws. The rock was warm: he placed the palm of his hand against it, flat. The earth beneath his boots was filled with the smell of autumn: he breathed deeply, cocking an eye at a hanging rib, a soaring corner, an ivy-filled crack.

  He stood there at the beginning of it where every line led upward, then he began to climb.

  He had remembered what was haunting him.

  He climbed slowly and amiably, placing his feet with care; here jamming a fist into a crack, there balancing his way across some steep slab while empty space burnt away beneath him like a fuse: and with him as he climbed went the long barren limestone scars of his youth, burning and distant under a foreign sun – the baking hinterlands of the Mingulay Peninsula in summer – the stones so bright at midday they hurt the eyes – the tinkers'caravans string 'themselves out like gems across the Mogadon Littoral – the sea-cliffs blaze in a fifty mile arc from Radiopolis to Thing 10, while, high above the stoneheaps and the thorny rubbish in the dry gullies, patrols a single lammergeyer, a speck on the burning bowl of the air! Each place or event he now saw miniaturised and arid, as if sealed in clear glass. He regretted none of them – but he was glad on the whole to have. exchanged them for the softer airs of the north; and the memory identified, the haunting laid, he let it slip away… Soon he was able to rest on a shaggy platform some three 'hundred feet from his starting point and perhaps two hundred more above the caravan on the valley floor. Here there was a cool breeze, and he could watch the jackdaws pursue their millenial evening squabble beneath him; 'harrying one another from roost to roost then exploding away into the clear air in a clatter of wings and sneers – to soar and drift and drop like stones into the treetops below before returning to the bramble-ledges to begin the whole tedious argument over again… He took off his belt and with it anchored himself among the roots of the yew with which he shared his perch. The air around him cooled; the light. began imperceptibly to fade; the long shoulders of the plateau receded north before him, horizon after horizon like grey pigeon feathers set against the enamelled blues and yellows of the sky. Across the valley he could no longer distinguish individual ash trees – crowned with a continuous lacy fretwork of branches, the sun red and unmoving above it, the far slope rose dark and sullen like a vast earthwork.