The cyclopean quays of Iron Chine are older than the Afternoon. No-one knows who built them, or for what crude purpose. The massive untrimmed blocks which comprise them are not native to this coast but cut from granites formed much further north. Who brought them down from there to bind them with iron and pile them in the cold sea, or when, is not known. They are black, and wet with fog, like the vertical walls of the fjord which contains them, the archaean unvegetated slates of which sweep down to an ebon sea. The enormous quayside buildings are also black; their purpose is quite lost and most of them have fallen into decay. The modern port subsists on fish, gulls'eggs, and mutton. Cowed by geography, time and the sea, its limewashed cottages huddle uneasily amid a greater architecture; above them a road has been pushed through the rotting slates, and winds its way perilously up to the clifftop pastures.
Down this Galen Hornwrack now rode (the dwarf beside him croaking tunelessly), puzzled by the mist that lay in the trough of the fjord. It was ashen and particulate. Inner currents stirred it sluggishly. A gust of wind, exploding over the lip of the cliffs and roiling down past him, parted it for a moment, but revealed only black water patterned by the rain. Yet he sensed it was occupied (although he could hardly have said by what): he stopped his horse, stood up in his stirrups, and craned his neck anxiously until the rift had closed again. 'What's this then?'he asked himself. He shook his head. 'Fulthor,'he called back, 'this may be unwise. Further down, where the air was calmer, he smelt smoke, urgent and powdery at the back of his nose. Now the dwarf became agitated too, wiping his nose with the back of his hand, squinting and sniffing about him like a nervous dog. Behind the smell of smoke was something sharper, less easy to identify.
Lower still, at the edge of the mist, halted before it like a swimmer at the margin of an unknown lake, he became convinced that people were moving about down there on the water in a panicky and disorientated fashion; and distant shouts came up to him, partly muffled by the mist but discernibly cries for aid. 'It may be unsafe, Fulthor,'But Fulthor motioned him on, and from then on events seemed to reach him at one remove, as if he was not quite part of them. It was a familiar feeling, and one that recalled the Bistro Californium, the deadly gamboge shadows of the Low City- Inside the mist was a distinct smell of lemons, and of
rotting pears – a moist and chemical odour which sought out and attacked the sensitive membranes of the body. The light was sourceless, and had the effect of sharpening outlines while blurring the detail contained within them: on Hornwrack's right, the dwarf looked as if he had been cut from grey paper a moment before – a tall queer hat, a goblin's profile, an axehead bigger than his own. Beyond this paper silhouette the path fell away into a whitish void in which Hornwrack made out now and then a localized and fitful carmine glow. While he was trying to remember what this reminded him of, Alstath Fulthor took station on his left. Their throats raw, their eyes streaming and their noses running, they advanced in a cautious formation until the path began to level out and they found themselves without warning on a wide stone concourse bordering the estuary.
Here the mist was infused with a thin yellow light. But for the slap of the waves on the waterstair below, but for the silence and the smell of the fog, they might have been in the Low City on any cold October night. Hornwrack led them to the water's edge, the hooves of the horses clacking and scraping nervously across an acre of worn stone slabs glistening with shallow puddles. A languor of curiosity came over them. Despite their forebodings they tilted their heads tQ hear the distant thud of wood on wood, the faint cries of men echoing off the estuary. Even Fay Glass was quite silent.
Hornwrack narrowed his eyes. 'Fulthor, there are no longer fishermen in this place.'Distances were impossible of judgement. He wiped his eyes; coughed. 'Something is on fire out there.'
The smell of smoke had thickened perceptibly, perhaps carried to them by some inshore wind. With it came a creaking of ropes and a. smell of the deep sea; groans and shouts startlingly close. Now a node of carmine light appeared, expanding rapidly. A cold movement of the air set the mist bellying like a curtain. Hornwrack shook his head desperately, looking about him in panic: abruptly he sensed an enormous object moving very close to him. The mist had all along distorted his perspectives -
'Back!'he shouted. 'Fuithor, get them back from the water!'Even as he spoke the mist writhed and broke apart. Out of it thrust the foreparts and figurehead of a great burning ship.
Its decks were deep with blood. Once it had been white. Now it rushed to destruction on the waterstair, spouting cinders. Its strange slatted metal sails, decorated with unfamiliar symbols, were melting as they fell. Captained by despair, it emerged from the mist like a vessel from hell, its figurehead an insect-headed woman who had pierced her own belly with a sword (her mouth, if it could be called a mouth, gaped in pain or ecstasy). 'Back!'cried Galen Hornwrack, tugging at his horse's head: 'Back!'
Fay Glass, though, only stared and sneezed like an animal, transfixed by the mad carven head gaping above her. Dying men tumbled over the sides of the ship, groaning. 'Back!'as the jean, charred hull drove blindly at the shore; 'Back!'as it smashed into the waterstair and with its bow torn open immediately began to sink.
Down it went, with a roar and a shudder. The deep cold water gurgled into its ravaged hull. Ratlines and halyards fell in blazing festoons about its cracked bowsprit. Horn-wrack pulled the madwoman off her horse and dragged her away. She wiped her nose. Sparks flew about their heads. The hulk lurched, settled a little lower in the water. A sail fell, showing Hornwrack for a moment a curious symbol – a hexagon with eccentric sides, through which crawled orange-throated lizards – before it hissed molten into the sea. High up in the doomed forecastle a solitary figure stood – mantled in blood. 'Murder!'it sobbed, staring wildly down at Hornwrack. 'They've followed us into the estuary!'It hacked with a blunt shortsword at a flaming spar. 'Oh, this damned mist!'Suddenly it was catapulted from its perch and with a thin wail fell into the water.
'Hornwrack!'
The burning ship reminded him of some childhood ritual, some solstitial bonfire lit in the wet dark ploughland. He turned almost reluctantly from it, his face stiff with heat. Fulthor, Tomb and the old man stood a little way off; toward them across the gleaming concourse men were running. 'To you, Fulthor!'he cried, just as he might have done beneath the heights of Minnet-Saba, where the rival factions of the Low City clash without chivalry at night; and, encumbered by the madwoman, promptly dropped the unfamiliar sword. 'Black filth, girl. Let go.'The weapon tolled like a bell on the worn flagstones. His horse trod on it. A fit of coughing racked him.
As he disentangled himself, though, he realised that the mist was dwindling round him like a dream, to reveal the giant quays and boatsheds; the little town; the slatey cliffs.
Seabirds called as they skimmed the water. Even the clouds were blowing away. For all the fears of the dead sailor, nothing floated out there on the roadstead. But for the bubbling wreck on the waterstair the estuary was empty of menace, quite empty. Puzzled, he drew his knife and urged forward his horse.
7: Saint Elmo Bujfin and the Navigators of Iron Chine
With the mist dispersed the village smelt of smoked fish and salt. Fulthor and his party stood outnumbered and uncertain at the centre of an unarmed crowd. Hornwrack had put up his knife. Like the survivors of some forgotten colonial war (desultory, expedient, never quite resolved) the occupants of Iron Chine drew round him: thin intelligent women, a few bare-limbed children. There were no young men present, only some old ones who stamped their feet and turned up their heavy collars, faded blue eyes watering in the cold wind. They stared up at him with a defiant incuriosity and he stared back embarrassed, although he could not have said precisely why. It was a mixed community; at the periphery of the crowd a handful of the Reborn hovered like strange, long-necked animals, their delicate features coarsened a little by an unrelenting deprivation. What had they left behind them in the Afternoon, what mad sophistications exchanged
for the smell of dead fish?
A few sailors who had escaped the wreck now swam ashore.
No-one offered them any help; nor did they seem to expect it, but pulled themselves up on to the quay and sprawled there with the blind, open-mouthed look of the exhausted. After a moment two of them got up again and between them pulled out a third. He kept trying to thank them. They knelt by his atrociously burnt head until a trickle of clear fluid ran out of the corner of his mouth; then they left him to stare sightlessly at a flock of gulls tearing pieces off something out on the estuary. They were yellow-haired, guileless, hardly more than children, but their faces were full of despair, as if they had fought a lifetime of holding actions and unplanned retreats. Alstath Fulthor observed them gravely for a minute or two then, finding no other authority and extricating himself with difficulty from the civilian crowd, presented them with his safe conducts.
'Our mission is one of importance,'he told them.
Eventually one of them said, 'This was not the time to come here.'He turned his back and, quietly dismissing the intrusion, vomited up a quantity of seawater. His companion put a placatory hand on his shoulder and reminded him,
'Captain, they come from the capital -'
But he only wiped his mouth and laughed wildly. 'Ay, and look at them! Some yellow old man, and a woman. Two city lordlings and their dwarf!'
A fit of dry retching shook him. 'There will never be any help from Viriconium,'he said indistinctly. There was self-pity in his voice, and after a moment or two he acknowledged it with a disgusted twist of his mouth. 'Did you see anything out there?'he asked; and when the other shook his head, whispered, 'I pity those that did.'
He tried to squeeze the salt water from his hair.
'One of our own vessels rammed us, that's certain,'he continued thoughtfully. 'But by then we were already burning.'
He shrugged.
'It was as usual. Those who saw anything were struck mad immediately. Those who did not got lost in the mist.'
Thus the defeated, locked in their dreams of defeat.
'You are bound to help us!'shouted Alstath Fulthor suddenly.
'Leave them alone, Fulthor,'advised Hornwrack. Often enough he had been among the defeated himself. His sudden compassion surprised him nevertheless; and that he should recognise it as such surprised him even further. He looked sidelong at Tomb the Dwarf to see if he had noticed anything, but the dwarf wasn't interested – he only grinned pleasantly and unforgivingly down at the sailors and said, 'There is no enemy in sight now.'
'They are bound by those signatures to help us,'said the Reborn Man less loudly.
They regarded him with puzzlement, and some scorn.
'Go up to the new hall,'was all they said, 'and leave us alone.'And they wandered off along the quay to where the remaining mast of the foundered ship poked up at a strange angle from a scum of floating wreckage. There a smell of lemons clung, as if some bitter dew had condensed on that doomed hull during its confused final voyage. It was an unearthly, chemical smell. The horses hated it.
The crowd, sensing a termination, looked on emptily for a minute or two, then began to disperse – the children drawn by a kind of magnetism toward the wreck while their elders took to the cobbled road which wound up into Iron Chine proper, where they vanished in twos and threes among the little two-storey houses with the wet slate roofs, the drying nets and lines of flaccid laundry. Dulled by the cold and continual privation, they seemed unable to react to a tragedy which, -as someone in Fulthor's party pointed out later, must have involved them all. One woman did stand for a time staring out into the estuary, a few tears drying on her cheeks in the wind. Only then did Hornwrack realise that more than one vessel had been involved. A spatter of rain blew out of the west (where like a great ancient fish there lay in wait the island continent of Fenlen) and into his face. He could see the 'new hall'on a rise above the village. He felt wretched.
'This wind is prising my joints apart,'said Cellur the birdmaker cheerfully. When no-one answered him he gave an impatient shrug. 'These people need more help than they could ever give us,'he told Fulthor. 'When you stop sulking you will see that.'
It came on to rain in earnest as they passed through the Chine. The peeling walls had once been gaily whitewashed, the window-boxes tended; now pale faces observed them from behind the streaming windows. Higher, they found they could look down into the boatyards of St Elmo Buffin, from which rose the masts and spars of his white and fated fleet – rakish three-hulled craft fitted with those peculiar slatted metal sails over which rioted orange lizards, green beetles glowing like fresh tattoos, and subtly distorted geometrical figures. Designed by the Afternoon, built by the Evening, blessed by a new madness of both, they were arming for some invisible war. 'DEATH'proclaimed one sail, and 'LIFE'another, in calligraphies rich and outlandish; while on the decks beneath shipwrights and sailors swarmed like rats.
'No hint of this war has ever come to us in the High City,'said Alstath Fulthor wonderingly. 'It is no wonder they are poverty stricken here.'
Higher still the 'new hall'hung above them like a threat. Sombre, columnar, mysterious of purpose, it had about it a most appalling air of age, an age which emptied out the cultural luggage of Alstath Fulthor's vanished race – all the moral atrocities and philosophical absurdities and expired technologies – and found it meaningless; rendering meaningless in the end even the deserts which were their only legacy to the Evening. As he approached it, wincing from the weather, huddling into his cloak against a wind a million years old, it spoke to Galen Hornwrack from an age fully as naive but by no means as puzzled as his own. It was a survivor of the Morning.
There was a ramshackle new construction perched on its roof like a greenhouse; from this flags were flying which no-one could identify, though Fulthor and the dwarf argued desultorily over their provenance. And down at its ancient front door, his big-knuckled hands clasped like a bunch of dice, stood the solitary principal of that lost maritime demesne, genius of a doomed fleet, St Elmo Buffin.
Elmo Buffin, that sad travesty, with his limbs like peeled sticks! He was seven feet tall and a yellow cloak was draped eccentrically about his bony shoulders. Plate armour of a dull-green colour encased him, sprouting all manner of blunt horns and spurs, little nubs and bosses which seemed chitinous and organic. It pulsed and shivered in its colour, for it had come to him from his father, a Reborn Man of the defunct House of medina-Clane, one of the first to be resurrected by Tomb the Dwarf and now dead. What his mother – a dour Northwoman and fishwife of Iron Chine, whose first husband had died in the War of the Two Queens – had bequeathed him is hard to say. Neither strain had bred true, for between Afternoon and Evening there is a great genetic as well as temporal gulf. Epilepsy racked him twice a week. His eyes were yellow and queer in that slack clownish face which seemed too large for his thin limbs. His brain heaved like the sea; across it visions came and went like the painted sails of his own fleet. Of years he had twenty-six; but his insanity made of that forty or fifty. Since the death of his father (himself an eccentric but principled man, who had consented to the miscegenation in order to cement the two halves of his bi-racial community) the whole weight of the Chine had rested on his shoulders.
How many of the villagers actually believed in his invisible enemy, or his experimental fleet? It seems immaterial. Those who died at sea knew the truth, as do we. Those that did not were nonetheless inspired by him. And if it did not thrive, well then the village survived. Buffin's success was as a symbol – queasy but enduring – which enabled past and present to collaborate. (His failure lay in underestimation; in being, if you like, not quite mad enough: but that was not to become clear until later, and who anyway could have been quite so mad as to imagine the actual state of affairs?) Now he stood in the doorway of the ancient ball, with its dreadful disregard for the passage of time and its rooftop contraptions worn with the air of a rakish hat, watching from the corner of his eye Fulthor's party as it approached. He was d
warfed by the dark columns. He could not keep still. He rubbed his hands to warm them in the cold air. He leant unconcernedly on the doorpost. Then he must look at his feet to admire his boots. Then, muttering to himself, jerk upright and practise a handshake with some imaginary visitor.
“'News from the City!”'they heard him murmur. 'Shall I say that? No. I must not appear so anxious. Shall I then enquire (thus, with a politic solicitude), “Your journey, it was comfortable?” Manifestly though, it was not -He snapped his fingers impatiently.
'Oh, what shall I say!'
Suddenly he dodged back among the columns and was lost to view. (Though it had no basis, Hornwrack retained for some time an impression of him huddled up there somewhere in the gloom the way a child might huddle breathless and white-faced behind the great half-opened doors of some echoing abandoned palace into which it has wandered; that palace being the world.)
After a moment he called querulously, 'Hello?'
No-one answered. Except for Fay Glass they had all got down from their horses and were staring astonished into the massive fluted shadows. Out popped his head like a crumpled leather bag on a stick, and he tapped the side of it mournfully. 'We're all mad here,'he sighed, as if the village, the boatyards and the ancient stones were all in some way contained within it: which, Hornwrack supposed, in a way they were. Now he recovered himself, smiling ironically; came forward and clasped Fulthor's hands. 'The briefest of aberrations,'he apologized (at this the mad woman pursed her lips enviously, and sniffed); 'Please forgive me:'and never referred to it again. 'Viriconium has sent observers then, at last!'
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