Viriconium

by M. John Harrison

  Yet rather than simply walking through a door, he seemed to rush out at her from the past. His hair blew back in the wind of time! She saw him for a moment silhouetted against some vanished dawn-the tall thin body held with a helpless formality, the misery in the eyes, the great ruined metal bird hanging from his belt. Only a moment, but in it she mistook self-concern for dignity; wept for the dead poet tegeus-Cromis; and wondered briefly why this tired hooligan should remind her of winter hyacinths blooming in a tower by the sea.

  It passed, of course.

  Alstath Fulthor followed the assassin in. Beyond the threshold they regarded one another like wary dogs; then Hornwrack shrugged and smiled slightly, and Fulthor turned away, looking disgusted. She offered them refreshment. Fulthor refused, picked up a book bound in olive leather, and stared angrily at it; while Hornwrack stood in front of her, swaying a little. He would not look at her. He smelt of death. Presently, Cellur and Tomb entered the room. Cellur took a little Mingulay wine, sighed-“These lamps somehow recall my buried life”-and sat down in the shadows. The dwarf made her a pretentious intricate bow, then leant against the wall, one leg bent to rub his calf.

  “You feel your House was wronged by mine,” she began without preamble. “We confiscated your estates. Our wars robbed you of your family.”

  Hornwrack favoured her with a bitter smile.

  “Houses?” he said. “Madam, my family were farmers.” He fingered his jaw where, she saw, something had recently laid it open to the bone. “Every airboat in the kingdom was destroyed so that you might keep your throne.” He stared over her head. “It was my freedom you robbed me of.”

  If she thought she could see the Queen’s Flight burning to ashes in his eyes (drifting down into the desert like withered leaves, spilling smoke and queer lights and little silent figures), she was wrong. He had not even seen their last defeat-only stood, sixteen years old, on the phlegmatic earth and watched them fly like greyhounds into the North: vessels, friends, captains all. None had ever returned, nor had he expected them to. The rest of the war he had passed in killing Northmen with a knife in the starving alleys of a captured city, practising unknown to himself the skills of the only trade his imagination had left to him.

  “Mornings,” he whispered feverishly, “chafe me still. I wake, and look into the empty air, and wonder if throne and empire were worth it-the burning boys and crystal ships.”

  He curled his lip and looked about him.

  “I would not come here again for fear of finding it was not.”

  His hand went quickly under his cloak.

  “Fulthor, do nothing!” he hissed. “I’ll kill you here, if I have to!”

  He wiped the back of his hand across his lacerated cheeks. Outside in the corridor a cold draught spoke of a change in the wind, a new weather. Inside, Alstath Fulthor let his baan drop back into its sheath. The dwarf cocked his head like a starling. The old man looked on from the shadows. Hornwrack relaxed slowly.

  “Madam,” he said, “your next family quarrel will have to be fought on the ground.”

  “Yet wrongs are not righted by hiding in the Low City,” Methvet Nian told him patiently.

  He shrugged.

  “Can you give me back the sky? If not, pay me for the service I did you last night and let me go. I believe the girl is worth something to you, and I bled for her. I do not hide in the Low City: I reject the High.”

  She would not believe him. (How could she?) Instead she offered him a myth of his own: a place among the hieratic furniture and exemplary figures of a long-declining dream In a rosewood chest with copper reinforcing bands she kept three things: a gourd-shaped musical instrument from the East; a short coat of mail, lacquered black; and an unpretentious steel sword with a sweat-darkened leather grip. Now she bit her lip, and went over to the chest, and took from it the sword and mail. For a moment she stood uncertainly with them in the centre of the room, facing first the Reborn Man-who would not meet her eyes-then Tomb (the old dwarf glanced at Hornwrack and made a sudden half-amused movement of his head) and Cellur, who only stared impassively at her-and finally the assassin himself.

  “Will these serve as payment?” she asked. “They are all I have.”

  Hornwrack looked surprised. He accepted the sword, hefted it; the mail coat he flexed with experienced fingers. He took a little rat’s tail file from under his cloak and nicked them with it.

  “They are steel,” he admitted, and shrugged. “A fair price, though I’d have preferred it as an ingot.” He stared at her, puzzled now. “If that is all, I’ll go.”

  “It is not all!” exclaimed Fulthor. “Methvet Nian, the message!” He stood between Hornwrack and the door. The powered blade came out, evil sparks dripping from it in the gloom.

  “Here’s a High City trick if you like!” laughed Hornwrack, who hadn’t a hope against it. He looked down at the old steel sword in his hand. “Still-”

  “Stop!” cried Methvet Nian. “Alstath Fulthor, are you mad?”

  His thin face white and sullen with confusion and rage, Fulthor let the baan fall to his side.

  “Do not touch him. He has done us a service.” And to Hornwrack: “My lord, I see you are wounded. Visit the hospitallers before you leave here.”

  Hornwrack nodded curtly. “Don’t come near the Low City after dark, Fulthor,” he said. At the door he paused, looked back. “I would prefer to owe the House of Nian nothing,” he told the Queen. He threw the mail coat on the floor and dropped the sword carefully on top of it.

  “The girl carried a bundle tied up in cloth,” he said. “A poet called Verdigris stole it. When he opened it he found an insect’s head the size of a melon. He couldn’t sell it anywhere.”

  Methvet Nian gazed at him in horror. He seemed unaware of it, leaning against the doorpost and staring into space. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so frightened,” he mused. He looked at her. “It’s in the gutter now, somewhere in the Low City. I left it there to rot, my lady. Goodbye.”

  Out beyond Monar the wind was shifting uncertainly, picking the first sleet of the season from the frigid summits and sea-lanes of the North. Later it would invest the city with rime, freezing airs, and a faint smell of rust; now it nosed like a cold black dog among the vast dunes and endless empty rubbish heaps of the Great Brown Waste, visiting the drab stones and foundered pylons, the half-buried wreckage of ten thousand years. What else moved up there, throwing its equivocal shadow over the Reborn communes (and mimicking the jerky, hesitant gait of the votaries of the Sign as they trod at night the streets of Viriconium, the measures of the dream)? The implications of Hornwrack’s statement were colder than any wind.

  “What can they have meant?” whispered Fulthor. “To send that?”

  But Tomb was intrigued by the departed assassin, and stared pensively after him. He went over and closed the door. “ Does he know whose sword it was?” he asked Fulthor absently. “Did he guess?” But Fulthor only rubbed his eyes tiredly and said, “He is a liar and a jackal.”

  The dwarf sniggered. “So am I.” He picked up the discarded sword and mail, smiled at Methvet Nian. “That was a valiant try, my lady. A stone would have unbent to you. Shall I put these away?”

  “One of you go after him and give them to him,” she replied. “Wait. I will do it.”

  When they stared at her, she laughed. “I meant him to have them.” She would let them say no more, but finished: “He saved the girl out of compassion, though he will never understand that.”

  But for a peculiar interruption, Fulthor, at least, would have pursued the matter: indeed his mouth was already open to form a protest when Cellur-who had been slumped for some minutes in his chair, a variety of expressions, each more unreadable than the last, chasing themselves across his face-gave a queer high-pitched cry and struggled to his feet as if he had woken suddenly from some implacable nightmare. His skin was grey. His accipitrine eyes were fixed on the door, as though Hornwrack still stood there; they were bright with anguish.
When Methvet Nian touched his shoulder he hardly seemed to notice her (beneath the odd embroidery of his robe, the bones were thin and unpredictable; brittle), but muttered desperately, “Fulthor! Tomb! No time to lose!”

  “Old man, are you ill?”

  “You did not hear it, Methvet Nian, the voice from the moon, with its ‘great wing against the sky.’ The insect’s head; the landings at night; the Sign of the Locust: all are one! I must go north immediately. All are one! ”

  “Cellur, what is it?” begged the Queen.

  “It is the end of the world if we are too late.”

  We value our suffering. It is intrinsic, purgative, and it enables us to perceive the universe directly. Moreover, it is a private thing which can neither be shared nor diminished by contact. This at least was Galen Hornwrack’s view, who, by the very nature of his calling, had been much concerned with pain. It was a view enshrined in the airless room above the Rue Sepile, and in his relationship with the boy, whose function had been less that of a nurse than of hierophant at his master’s lustral agonies. As Hornwrack had grown used to the smell of self-recrimination-which in the Rue Sepile as nowhere else is compounded of dead geraniums, dry rot, and one’s own blood squeezed out of towels-he had also grown to welcome it, as he welcomed the black fevers of his deeper wounds, in which he rediscovered a symbolic reenactment of his crimes.

  In Methvet Nian’s infirmary, however, he had found none of this, but instead open casements and cheerful voices and, worst of all, that good-humoured competence by which the professional nurse-who otherwise could not bear it-demeans the pain and indignity suffered by her charge. In short: they had stitched him up but refused to let him brood. Some three days after the events in the Queen’s sitting room, therefore, he had extricated himself from the place and now stalked the corridors of the palace in an uncertain temper.

  His cloak had been returned to him, washed and mended. Beneath it he wore the mail of Methvet Nian, and at his side hung the unaccustomed sword. Both chafed, as did the manner in which he had come by them. He had, it is true, gone to some trouble to find for the sword a scabbard of dull moulded leather, and it looked well on him. Nevertheless, the sword is a weapon chiefly of the High City, and he felt ill-at-ease with it. He had had little training in its use. As he hurried toward the throne room for what he hoped would be the last time, he touched the knife hidden beneath his cloak, to assure himself he was not unarmed. As for the Queen’s intentions, he understood none of them. She had first tried to bribe and latterly to patronize him; he was full of resentment. It was a dangerous frame of mind in which to encounter the Queen’s dwarf, who had on his face a sardonic grin.

  His short legs were clad in cracked black leather, his thick trunk in a sleeveless jerkin of some woven material, green with age; his bare forearms were brown and gnarled; and his hands resembled a bunch of hawthorn roots. Indeed he looked very like a small tree, planted up against the throne-room doors, stunted and unlovely against their serpentine metallic inlays and ornamental hinges. On his head was a curious truncated conical hat, also of leather and much worn.

  “Here is our bravo, with his new sword,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “So the dwarf says,” murmured Hornwrack, pleasantly enough. “Let me pass.”

  The dward sniffed. He looked along the passage, first one way and then the other. He crooked a finger, and when Hornwrack bent down to listen, whispered, “The thing is, my lord assassin, that I understand none of this.”

  And he jerked his horny thumb over his shoulder to indicate, presumably, the throne room.

  “Pardon?”

  “Voices, from above. Insects. Madmen, and madwomen too. One comes back from the dead (albeit he’s a good friend of mine), while another runs like a greyhound at the sound of a song. Both old friends of mine. What do you think of that?”

  He looked around.

  “The Queen, ” he said, lowering his voice, “gives away the sword of tegeus-Cromis!”

  He laughed delightedly at Hornwrack’s start of surprise, revealing broken old teeth.

  “Now you and I are plain men. We’re fighting men, I think you’ll agree. Do you agree?”

  “This sword,” said Hornwrack. “I-”

  “That being so, us being ordinary fighting men, we must have an understanding, you and I. We must treat gently with one another on this daft journey north. And we must look after the mad folk; for after all, they cannot look after themselves. Eh?”

  Hornwrack made as if to pass into the throne room.

  “I’ll make no journey with you or anyone else, Dwarf. As for gifts, they can be easily returned. You are all madmen to me!”

  He had not gone so much as a step towards the inlaid doors when a terrific blow in the small of his back pitched him forward onto his face. Tears filled his eyes. Astonished and desperate-he thought the dwarf had stabbed him-he fumbled for his knife and scrabbled into a kneeling position: only to find his tormentor grinning ironically at him, unarmed but for those disproportionate arthritic hands. Before he could haul himself to his feet, the dwarf-whose head was now on a level with his own-had first embraced him lightly, then spat in his ear and hit him again, this time somewhere down below his ribs. His knife clattered away. His breath deserted him. Through his own heaving and choking he heard the dwarf say coldly “I like you, Galen Hornwrack. But that is the sword of my old friend, which was given you in good faith.”

  Hornwrack shook his head and took his chance. He reached forward and clasped with both hands the nape of the dwarf’s neck, then pulled him forward sharply. As their heads connected, the dwarf’s nose broke like a dry stick. “Black piss,” he said surprisedly, and sat down. They went seriously at it then, and neither could get the advantage: for though the dwarf was cunning, old, and hard, the assassin was as quick as a snake; and both of them knew well the cul-de-sacs and wineshop floors where the anonymous chivalry of the Low City settles its quarrels amid the slime and the sawdust.

  It was Cellur who discovered them there twenty minutes later. There was a yellow malice in their eyes as they staggered about in the bloody-mouthed gloom taunting one another in hoarse, clogged voices-but it was fading like a sunset, and as he watched, in the puzzled manner of someone who doesn’t quite know what it is he’s watching, he heard this final exchange:

  “I beg my lord the sheep’s arse to change his mind.”

  “My brain is as addled as a harlot’s egg. Get me out of this place, Dwarf. It stinks of kindness. North if you like. What do I care?”

  6

  THE SUDDEN EMBODIMENT OF BENEDICT PAUCEMANLY

  Cellur could not (or would not) articulate his fears more clearly. He questioned Fay Glass, it is true: but nothing was revealed, her contribution being only a babble of archaisms and ancient songs; bits and pieces-or so Alstath Fulthor maintained-plucked from the racial memory as she pursued her lonely temporal descent. “She understands us: but speaks from a vast distance, no longer sure what language to use, or what to say.” Despite this, Cellur argued, it was clear that she knew the secret of the insect’s head-why else should she show such distress at her own failure to communicate? Since she could not tell them what had happened there, it was, he repeated, essential to follow her back to the North.

  “She is in herself the message: and a call for help.”

  When Fulthor protested that, as seneschal, he could not abandon the Queen while the Sign of the Locust grew so in power, harassing daily the Reborn of the city and infiltrating its prime functions, Cellur only said: “I shall need you. Your people in the Great Brown Waste will not treat with me. They are too far gone on this ‘road to the Past’ you describe. When we have discerned the meaning of the insect’s head, that will be the time; when we have understood the warning from the moon, and discovered the landing sites in the North, then we shall know what to do about the Sign of the Locust.”

  And Fulthor could only stare out into Viriconium, where at night in a lunar chiaroscuro of gamboge and blue, the long pr
ocessions wound silently from one street to another, to the accompaniment of a small aimless wind.

  The weather deteriorated as he watched, a raw air piling up against the massif of the High City and filling the Low with damp. Beneath a thick grey sky the watery plazas took on a wan and occult look, while in the pensions of the Rue Sepile the old women coughed all day over their affairs, and the atmosphere became adhesive with the smell of cabbage. The walls seeped. It was, all agreed, no time to be living in the Artists’ Quarter, and, perhaps as an addendum to this theory, gossip remarked the sudden disappearance of Galen Hornwrack. Had he indeed quarrelled with Ansel Verdigris, his erstwhile crony (some said over a coin, though others maintained it was a woman from the North, or even the wording of a verse in a ballade of smoked fish)? Up and down the hill from Minnet-Saba, huddling closer to brazier and guttering cresset, his enemies and rivals scratched their heads-or else, distempered, fought among themselves.

  The object of this attention, meanwhile, languished in the draughty corridors of Methven’s hall, where he examined his wounds from hour to hour and honed morosely his knife, gripped by the phthisis and melancholy of early winter. He had little contact with his new companions. He avoided Fulthor and thus, of necessity, the discussions in the throne room. Once or twice he heard the madwoman singing in some chamber. Of Tomb, who had in such a peculiar manner befriended him (at least he supposed it was that), he had no news. Methvet Nian having at last agreed to an expedition, therefore provision must be made of food, horses, weapons, and such safe conducts as were necessary. The dwarf had concerned himself with this, and with preparations of his own, and was not much about the palace.