A Storm of Wings v-2

by M. John Harrison

  Out there Cellur waited impatiently, staring west or south. 'Rouse Iron Chine!'came a faint cry through the crack and belly of the gale. Hornwrack never saw either of them again. 'On the shores of the diamond lake,'sang the madwomen in a weird voice,

  'We shall watch the fishes, On the summits of the mountains Cry “Erecthalia!”

  We are off to Vegys now. '

  The weather closed in. He was alone. Even the ghost of Benedict Paucemanly, part at least of its purpose accomplished, had gone out like a candle. In the deserted village it might as easily have been evening as afternoon. Out of the crepuscular sky issued a thin snow which drifted up behind the dry corpses, blew into the empty rooms, and plastered itself to the windward eaves. Every so often the wind from the Deep Waste mingled with it a scatter of old ice, flinging it down the street like two handfuls of dirty glass beads. He rubbed the back of his neck. How had he come to be stranded in the cold north with two lunatics, and no option but to go and look for a third? After Iron Chine he would make his way south along the coast, since he knew no other route (that inhospitable strand, with its distant illusions and tottering cliffs, now seemed familiar and comforting); he would lose himself again in the Low City. Perhaps he would find the boy. He would kill the dwarf if he ever had the chance.

  All this time, off at the edge of his awareness, faint telepathies crawled like maggots round the rim of a saucer. Up there on the Agdon scarp was a stealthy and purposeful movement, too far away to hurt him yet, too close for comfort. Suddenly he became frightened that. they would come down unexpectedly and discover him among their dead. What delicate revenge might they take? In any case he could not bear their thoughts in his skull. Two horses had been left him for three people. Feverishly he urged the madwoman up on to one of them; and then with his hand on his knife approached the Reborn Man, wishing the dwarf had captured the baan during their brief scuffle beneath the horse. Eyeing him with a sad amusement, Fulthor said, 'I will run beside you. It is not so far.'

  The ramshackle conservatory of St Elmo Buflin, with its invented flags and fantastic telescopes, teetered high above the fish docks of the port, full of silence, brackish air and the smell of the food they had been served there a week or more ago. Buffin sat as if he had not moved since then, in a high-backed chair surrounded by plates of congealed herring. He had taken off his, father's armour and underneath was swathed in some dirty white stuff, linen or flannel, as if he suffered with his joints. He was staring at nothing, his long thin legs thrust out in front of him and crossed as though they belong to someone else, his baglike face crumpled and desperate. His instruments lay smashed. They were no more or less meaningful for it: nests of bent brass tubing, complex coloured lenses pulled apart like sugared anemones underfoot. The charts he had ripped down, to reveal the walls beneath. He had lost his patience with them, perhaps.

  Hornwrack wiped the condensation from a cracked pane, looked out.

  'You need not have done this to yourself,'he said.

  It was such a waste. He felt hot and angry, cold and remote, all at once.

  'What happened here?'

  Buffin did not answer for a long time. The Afternoon had betrayed him again, and the old powered knife with which he had tried to kill himself now lay sputtering feebly in his lap, its energies spent at last. Some blood had flowed, then dried brown. He did not seem to be able to move his head. The silence drew out. Wondering if he was already dead, Hornwrack waited, breathing evenly and trying to make out what was happening in the port below.

  'What does it matter?'came the eventual answer. Then, after another long pause: 'Of the fleet I ordered the uncompleted part destroyed. It is of no use now. Viriconium will never help us now.'He laughed quietly. 'The rest has sailed, into madness and death. The mist surrounds us (can you not hear it? It is like bells!) and all has failed.'

  He bit his bottom lip. 'I dare not move my head,'he said, staring forward at nothing, fingering the hilt of the useless knife. 'Can you see what I have done?'

  'Your throat is cut,'said Hornwrack, breathing on the glass. 'But not well.'

  If he wiped a circle on the glass with the palm of his hand he could see framed in it the black original buildings of the fjord squatting like toads on the lower slopes. To his right a cliff swept up, also black, and laced for five hundred feet with icy ledges. Until recently ice had locked the harbour: now churned and broken sheets of it bobbed in the black channels cut by the departed fleet. Beneath him banks of white vapour hung, drifting sluggishly down the cobbled slopes toward the shrouded quays. In places it was deep enough to cover the upper casements of the cottages as it was driven reluctantly between them by the bitter intermittent wind; in others, where it was shallower, he thought he could see heads and torsos going about above it on some cryptic dislocated errand. The suggestion of movement beneath it he tried to ignore. Above all this in the green subarctic sky, aurorae flickered, and great streaks of red and black cloud mimicked the flame and smoke beneath, where men ran despairingly among the boatyards with torches, setting fire to their labour of years.

  Death was written in the scrollwork at the bows, death on the painted sterns and the ornate brass bells.'DEATH', proclaimed the painted sails, while the white decks beneath bubbled and charred, generating a heat fierce enough to melt the metal masts. Ash whirled into the air, unknown incandescent alloys showered down, last fruit of that doomed collaboration between Afternoon and Evening (which now pursue their separate courses, as we know). Rolling into the flames, the mist turned them instantly green and blue; and was itself transformed with a roar into a greyish powdery smoke which, sucked up in the merciless updraughts, bellied out above the doomed craft in a choking spherical cloud. Spars flared and fell. Ratlines parted with the sound of a broken violin. Here and there a man was trapped in a tangle of ropes, or caught among the stays beneath a blazing bowsprit with no-one to hear his cries. At the height of the fire a single painted sail escaped its ties, unfurled, billowed upward. For a brief moment a pair of great illusory lizards danced in the air! -only to sink with a regretful whisper and be consumed, writhing amid the smoke in a counterfeit of the pain in St Elmo Buffin's frigid, frightened stare.

  'I had no life,'said Buffin, 'even as a child.'Hornwrack bent close to the cold lips to hear. 'My father bade me, “Watch the sea.”'

  'I've had no life either,'said Hornwrack.

  He forced himself to look through the one surviving telescope. At first he could see nothing. A sailor rushed into the room behind him shouting, 'Buffin, they are among us in the fog!'Seeing Hornwrack he halted uncertainly. A pleading note entered his voice. 'Buflin, only one ship

  remains. Let us take you aboard her!'

  'He is dead,'said Hornwrack, who now discerned a sad grey ground, and against that something spinning at the end of a thread. 'What's happened here?'

  'A fog followed us ashore this morning. The women and children are all dead of it.'He stared at Hornwrack's back. 'Great locusts inhabit it!'

  'They are your longtime enemy. Where does this last ship sail?'

  'West, after the fleet, as he would have wished.'

  Spinning, spinning.

  'Take me then,'said Hornwrack, 'instead.'

  He turned from the telescope and went out of the door. In the empty room a masked figure materialised briefly in the air above the corpse, and was gone.

  During the journey from Agdon Roches, Alstath Fulthor had regained a measure of his sanity – that is to say he now remembered where and, to an extent, who he was; but the girl had chopped his hair to a ragged stubble one night while he slept, giving him something of her own hollow-eyed, perpetually-surprised expression; and his skin had taken on a bleached unearthiy look, like a saint's. They were often together, reciting the rhymes that comprised her vocabulary, practising the scraps of meaningless dialogue and lists of non-existent cities which seemed to be her 'keys'to the Past. Fulthor was learning, in the way the child of an exile learns those bits and pieces of its heritage that rema
in (and which, after so much repetition, undergo a sea-change, bearing less and less relationship to a vanished culture in a land it has never seen). Hornwrack tried to ignore their public tendernesses, their strange, almost unemotional sexual contacts; and clothed his embarrassment in a characteristic surliness.

  He found them now down in the port, two tall, awkward figures wrapped in cloaks, standing uncomfortably near the burning boatyards. Despite the heat and smoke they were waiting exactly where he had left them, the flames reflected in their calm odd eyes. Later, at the rail of the last ship, watching the sailors warp her sadly from the bleak shore, Fulthor seemed disposed to talk. He was lucid, polite, aware:

  but each new immersion in the stream of memory had carried him further from his Evening existence and its events; and he had forgotten his earlier shoddy treatment of St Elmo Buffin. So when he asked, 'How then did the shipwright die?'it was cruel of Hornwrack to reply,

  . 'He cut his own throat, but it was you he died of.'

  Iron Chine would not survive him. Fires had now sprung up among the cottages, set by the sailors before they left; and small flames danced behind the panes of the dilapidated conservatory above the town. The strip of black water between the boat and the quay grew wider. The frigid cliffs slipped past; the curious flags and strips of coloured rag flying over the conservatory blazed up one by one; above everything burned the clouds, like the bloody auroral sunset of some other planet.

  What happened to the fleet of St Elmo Buffin? It was not provisioned well. He had given small thought to navigating

  it. Much of it was lost immediately amid the white water and foul ground, the atrocious currents and uncharted islands which outlie the jagged coast of Viriconium. Much of it, hampered by the ice which formed on decks and rigging, turned quietly turtle in the gelid sea. There were fogs, too, lying in hundred-mile banks across the straits which separate Fenlen from Iron Chine; and in these the greatest loss was incurred. Each ship fought alone, wrapped in a dreamlike shroud of pearly light. Ice burned like alum on the ratlines and stays. There were collisions, mutinies, accidental fires and shouts as of other men desperate and dying beyond the nacreous wall of fog. It was in all aspects a lost venture. The fog smelled of rotting fruit; and at the sound of wings men leapt overboard or cut their own throats, staring dumbly for a last few seconds at a universe faceted like an insect's eye. One ship survived.

  Imagined a low dark coastline shelving back through a series of eroded fossil beaches into a desolation which makes the deepest waste of Viriconium seem like a water-meadow. Nothing lives about these beaches but limpets and kelp; a few curiously furtive terns which survive for the most part by eating one another's eggs; and in season a handful of deformed seals. Chemical rivers make their way here from the continental marshes north and west; tars and oils from sumps a thousand years old and a thousand miles inland trickle sluggishly down the terraces of black pumice, staining them emerald green, ochre, purple. Imagine a glaucous ocean; a low swell at the freezing point, lapping at the brutal shore. Strings and bulbs of mineral pigment wave beneath the water like weed, growing from the chemical silt. There is no wind to speak of. Out to sea about a mile, a bank of mist is rolling south, parallel to the coast.

  Imagine a white ship: rudderless, masts bent beneath their load of ice.

  Her deckplates are up, buckled like lead foil, her wheelhouse blackened by the same fire which lately ate into her hull amidships. Her figurehead hangs loose in a wreck of stays, a partly human form difficult of exact description. She is down at the stern and listing to starboard. Silently, captured by some current invisible from the shore, she is drawn in toward the beach; quicker and quicker until she rams the stained pumice shelves with a groan and, ripped open, goes over by the bow and begins to sink. A few birds fly up from her yards. Chips of ice rattle down. A sail, partly unfurled by the shock of the collision, shows a great drunken beetle to the empty beach. Bedded in the poisonous silt, she will settle no further, but nudges the shore with every wave.

  After a few minutes a grotesque shape begins to form in the cold air above her shattered deck, like a crude figure of a man projected somehow on a puff of steam.

  9: The Explanations of the Ancient Airboatman

  Midwinter clutches the Pastel City, cold as thought.

  In the Cispontine Quarter the women have been to and fro all day gathering fuel. By afternoon they had stripped the empty lots to the bare hard soil, bobbing in ragged lines amid the sad induviate stems of last year's growth, their black shawls giving them the air of rooks in a potato field. Not an elder or bramble is left now but it is a stump; and that will be grubbed up tomorrow by some enterprising mattock in a bony hand. At twilight, which – exhaled, as it were, from every shattered corner – comes early to the City's broken parts, they filled the nearby streets for half-an-hour, hurrying westwards with their unwieldy bundles to where, along the Avenue Fiche and the Rue Sepile, Margery Fry Road and the peeling old 'Boulevard Saint Ettiene', the old men sat waiting for them with souls shrivelled up like walnuts in the cold. Now they sit by reeking stoves, using the ghost of a dog-rose to cook cabbage!

  Cabbage! The whole of the Low City has smelt of this delicacy all winter. It is on everyone's breath and in everyone's overcoat. It has seeped into the baize cloth of everyone's parlour. It has insinuated itself into the brickwork of every privy, coagulated in alleys, hung in unpeopled corners and conserved its virtues, waiting for the day when it might come at last to the High City. This evening, like an invisible army, it filtered by stages along the Boulevard Aussman, where it woke the caged rabbits in the bakers'back yards and caused the chained dogs to whimper with excitement; flowed about the base of the hill at Alves, investing the derelict observatory with an extraordinary new significance; and passed finally to the heights of Minnet-Saba, where it gathered in waves to begin its stealthy assault on the High Noses. On the way it informed some strange crannies: inundating for instance a little-used arm of the pleasure canal at Lowth, where its spirit infected incidentally a curious tragedy on the ice.

  The air was bitter inside the nose, the sky as black as anthracite. The Name Stars glittered cynically, commemorating some best-forgotten king. Down below on the frozen canal a grubby satin booth was pitched, its yellow shutters up, its cressets cold. From its door a long-legged brazier, kept fed with frigid horse dung, looked out like a red eye. In it, under the zodiacal representations and the testimonials to its proprietor's efficacy, a poet and a for tune teller sat, cheating one another feverishly at 'blind Michael'.

  The poet was a rag of a man, little, and hollow-cheeked from a life of squalor, with his bright red hair stuck up on his head like a wattle and greed lurking in the corners of his grin. He gave his small hands no rest – when he was not trying to palm cards or filch the bottle, he was flapping them about like a wooden puppet's. At slow moments during the play he would stare silently into the air with his face empty and his mouth slack; then, catching himself, leap up from the three-legged stool on which he sat and go jigging round the booth until by laughing and extemporizing he had got his humour back. In mirth, or delivering doggerel, his voice had a penetrating hysterical timbre, like a knife scraped desperately on a plate. He had made a 'ballade of stewed cabbage'earlier that evening, but seemed to hate and fear the smell of the stuff, grimacing with dilated nostrils and turned-down mouth when a wave of it passed through the booth. His name was Ansel Verdigris, and the fat woman across the card table was his last resort.

  Fat Main Etteilla with her aching ankles and her fatal cough, known to be the wisest woman in the Low City: yet she paid the poet's debts; admired his verses without in the least understanding them; and, though he gave her nothing in return for it, forgave both his perversions and his frequent distempers. All is made possible in the shadow of the Dark Man. On his calmer days Verdigris sat on her knee and ventriloquized her customers. When his nerves were bad, and he drove them away by spewing on the cards, she slapped his head. He made her laugh. She feare
d death, but he feared everything: and the closer to death she came the better she looked after him. One of her great soft hands made three of his! They were an odd pair to be keeping the night alive like that down on the deserted pleasure canal while worthier people slept. There was a cemetery behind the booth, and Verdigris could not keep his eyes off it.

  At midnight he scratched his armpits and parted for the hundredth time the grubby satin curtains. The gravestones seemed to stretch back indefinitely under the moonlight. Where they ceased the Artists'Quarter began, its piebald roofs hanging on the dark skyline like an evil conundrum. Up the slope went his eyes, through the graves and into the city; back again. 'You sleep well enough out there!'he jeered, and then said a name the fortune teller could not catch. His narrow angular shoulders shuddered convulsively. She called him back but he hardly heard. He had not slept well himself since the night he murdered Galen Hornwrack. It was a yellow night, that one, grimed into his raddled brain and smelling of that unspeakable bundle with its rotting eyes. Ever since, he had had a feeling of being followed around. 'Someone walked over my grave,'he said. He laughed. 'Well I'll not mourn!'The moonlight flooding past him into the booth was of a peculiar cast: in it, as we shall soon see, things seemed almost more solid than they did in broad daylight. 'They sleep well enough out there on All Men's Heath,'he said, and made to draw the satin closed.