Viriconium

by M. John Harrison

  If you went up into the foothills outside, claimed Emmet Buffo, and looked down into the city through a telescope, you could see the affected zone spreading like a thin fog. “The instrument reveals something quite new!” The Low City streets, and the people you could see in them (and he had an instrument which enabled them to be seen quite clearly) were a little faded or blurred, as if the light was bad or the lenses grimy. But if you turned the identical telescope on the pastel towers and great plazas of the High City, they stood out as bright and sharp as a bank of flowers in the sun. “It is not the light at fault after all, or the instrument!” Whether you believed him or not, few areas south of the Boulevard Aussman remained safe; and to the east the periphery of the infection now threatened the High City itself along the line of the Margarethestrasse, bulging a little to accommodate the warren of defeated avenues, small rentier apartments, and vegetable markets which lay beneath the hill at Alves. Buffo’s observations might or might not be reliable. In any case they only told part of the story. The rest lay in the Low City, and to appreciate it you had to go there.

  Ashlyme, who was there and didn’t appreciate it, put down his easel and massaged his elbow. With the onset of the plague all the streets in this corner of the city had begun to seem the same, lined with identical dusty chestnut trees and broken metal railings. He had walked down the Rue Serpolet ten minutes ago, he discovered, without recognising it. The houses on either side of Audsley King’s were empty. Piles of plaster and lath and hardened mortar lay everywhere, evidence of grandiose and complicated repairs which, like the schemes of the rentiers who had instituted them, would never be completed. Speculation of this kind was feverish in the plague zone: a story was told in the High City in which a whole street changed hands three times in one week, its occupants remaining lethargic and uninterested.

  Audsley King had a confusing suite of rooms on an upper floor. The stairs smelt faintly of geraniums and dried orange flowers. Ashlyme stood uncertainly on the landing with a cat sniffing round his feet. “Hello?” he called. He never knew what to expect from her. Once she had sprung out on him from a closet, laughing helplessly. He could hear low voices coming from one of the rooms but he couldn’t tell which. He set his easel down loudly on the bare boards. The cat ran off. “It’s Ashlyme,” he said. He went from room to room looking for her. They were full of paintings propped up against the neutral cream walls. He found himself staring down into a square garden like a cistern, full of darkness and trailing plants. “I’m here,” he called-but was he? She made him feel like a ghost, swimming idly around waiting to be noticed. He opened what he thought was a cupboard but it turned out to be a short hall with a green velvet curtain at the end of it, which gave on to her studio.

  She was sitting there on the floor with Fat Mam Etteilla, the fortune-teller and cardsharp. One lamp gave out a yellow light which was reflected from the upturned cards: threw the women themselves into prominence but failed to light the rest of the room, which was quite large. Consequently they seemed to be posed, in their strained and graceless attitudes, against a yellow emptiness in which hung only the faintest suggestions of objects- a pot of anemones, the corner of an easel, or a window frame. This lent a bewildering ambiguity to the scene he was later to paint from memory as “Visiting the women in their upper room.” In the picture we see the Fat Mam sitting with her skirts pulled up to her thighs and her legs spread out, facing the cards (these are without symbols and, though arranged for divination, predict nothing). Crouched between her thighs and also facing the cards is a much thinner woman with hair cropped like an adolescent boy’s and a body all elbows and knees. Ashlyme’s treatment of these figures is extraordinary. Their arms are locked together and they seem to be rocking to and fro-in grief, perhaps, or in the excesses of some strange and joyless sexual spasm. A few brutal lines contain them; all else is void. There is some humanity in the way he has coloured the skirts of the Fat Mam. But Audsley King is looking defiantly out of the canvas, her eyes sly.

  They remained in this position for thirty seconds or so after he had pulled back the curtain. The studio was quiet but for the hoarse breathing of the fortune-teller. Audsley King smiled sleepily at Ashlyme; then, when he said nothing, reached out deliberately and disarranged the cards. Suddenly she began coughing. She put her hand hurriedly over her mouth and turned her head away, writhing her thin shoulders in the attempt to expel something. “Oh, go away you old fool,” she said indistinctly to the fortune-teller. “You can see it hasn’t worked.” When Ashlyme took her hand it was full of blood. He helped her to a chair and made her comfortable while the Fat Mam put away the cards, brought water, lit the other lamps.

  “How tired I am,” said Audsley King, smiling up at him, “of hearing my lungs creak all day like new boots.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “It makes me so impatient.”

  The haemorrhage had left her disoriented but demanding, like a child waking up in the middle of a long journey. She forgot his name, or pretended to. But she would not let him leave: she would not hear of it. He would set up his easel like a proper painter and work on the portrait. Meanwhile she would entertain him with anecdotes, and the Fat Mam would read his fortune in the cards. They would make him tea or chocolate, whichever he preferred.

  Ashlyme, though, had never seen her so pale. Should she not go to bed? She would not go to bed. She would have her portrait painted. In the face of such determination, what could he do but admire her harsh, mannish profile and white cheeks, and comply? After he had been drawing for about an hour he put down the black chalk and said carefully,

  “If you would just come to the High City. Rack is a charlatan, but he would have you well cared for, if only to safeguard his investment.”

  “Ashlyme, you promised me.”

  “It will soon be too late. The quarantine police-”

  “It’s already too late, you stupid man.” She moved her shoulders fretfully. “The plague is here”-indicating herself and then the room at large, with its morosely draped furniture and empty picture frames-“and in here. It hangs in the street down there like a fog. They will make no exceptions, we have already learned that.” For a moment a terrible hunger lit up her eyes. But it turned slowly into indifference. “Besides,” she said, “I would not go if they did. Why should I go? The High City is an elaborate catafalque. Art is dead up there, and Paulinus Rack is burying it. Nothing is safe from him-or from those old women who finance him-painting, theatre, poetry, music. I no longer wish to go there.” Her voice rose. “I no longer wish them to buy my work. I belong here.”

  Ashlyme would have argued further. She said she would cough herself to death if he did. He went miserably back to his work.

  A curious listlessness now came over the studio-the dull, companionable silence of the plague zone, which stretched time out like a thread of mucus. Mam Etteilla shuffled the cards. (What was she doing here, this fat patient woman, away from her grubby satin booth in the Plaza of Unrealised Time? What arrangement had been made between them?) She set the cards out; read them; gathered them up without a word. She did this sitting on the floor, while Audsley King looked on expressionlessly, for the present indifferent to her condition, as if she were dreaming it. The feverish energy of the haemorrhage seemed to have left her; she had sunk into her chair, eyes half closed. Only once did the symbols on the cards attract her attention. She leaned forward and said,

  “As a young girl I lived on a farm. It was somewhere in the damp, endless ploughland near Soubridge. Every week my father killed and plucked three chickens. They hung on the back of a door until they were eaten. I hated to pass them, with their small mad heads hanging down, but it was the only way to get to the dairy.” One day, opening the door, she had seen an eyelid fall suddenly closed over an eye like a glass bead. “Now I dream that it is dead women who hang behind the door: and I imagine one of them winks at me.” Catching Ashlyme’s astonished glance she laughed and ran her hand along the arm of her chair. “Perhaps it
never happened. Or not to me. Was I born in Soubridge, or have I been here all the time, in the plague zone? Here we are prone to a fevered imagination.” She watched her hand a moment longer, moving on the arm of the chair, then seemed to fall asleep.

  Ashlyme, relieved, immediately packed his chalks and folded his easel.

  “I must go while it is still dark,” he told the Fat Mam. She put her finger to her lips. She held up one of the cards (he could not see what was on it, only the yellow reflection of the lamp), but did not answer otherwise. I will return, he pantomimed, tomorrow evening. As he passed her chair the dying woman whispered disconcertingly, “Yearning has its ghosts, Ashlyme. I painted such ghosts, as you well know. Not for pleasure! It was an obligation. But all they want in the High City is trivia.” She clutched his hand, her eyes still closed. “I don’t want to go back there, Ashlyme, and they wouldn’t want me if I did: they would want some pale, neutered shadow of me. I belong to the plague zone now.”

  The fortune-teller let him out into the street. The cat rubbed his legs. As he made off in the direction of the High City he heard something heavy falling in an upper room, and a confused, ravaged voice called out, “Help me! Help me!”

  He continued to visit the Rue Serpolet once or twice a week. He would have gone more frequently but he had other commissions. An inexplicable lethargy gripped him: while he still had access to the dying woman he found it hard to finalise his plans for her rescue. Still, the portrait was progressing. In exchange for his preliminary sketches and caricatures, which had delighted her with their cruelty, she gave him some small canvases of her own. He was embarrassed. He could not accept them; compared to her he was, he protested, only a talented journeyman. She coughed warningly. “I would be honoured to take them,” he said. He came no closer to understanding her relationship with the fortune-teller, who was now seen only rarely at her yellow booth in the Artists’ Quarter, and spent her time instead laundering bloody handkerchiefs, preparing meals which Audsley King allowed to cool uneaten, and endlessly turning over the cards.

  The cards!

  The pictures on them glowed like crude stained glass, like a window on some other world, some escape. That the fortune-teller saw them so was plain. But Audsley King looked on expressionlessly, as before. She was using them, he thought, for something else: some more complex self-deception.

  All his visits were made via the Gabelline Stairs. There was a considerable volume of traffic there during the plague months. Ashlyme made an oddly proper little figure among the poets and poseurs, the princelings, politicians and popularists who might be found ascending or descending them at dawn and dusk. But his peculiar red coxcomb gave him away as one of them. One morning just before dawn he encountered two drunken youths on the stairs where they went round behind Agden Fincher’s famous pie shop. They were a rough-looking pair, with scabby hands and hair of a dirty yellow colour chopped to stubble on their big round heads. They wore outlandish clothes, which were covered with food stains and worse.

  When he first saw them they were sitting on each side of the stair, throwing a bruised melon back and forth between them. They were singing tunelessly,

  “We are the Barley brothers.

  Ousted out of Birmingham and Wolverhampton,

  Lords of the Left Hand Brain,

  The shadows of odd doings follows us through the night,” but they soon stopped that.

  “Give us yer blessing, vicar!” they called. They staggered up to Ashlyme and fell at his feet, bowing their heads. He had no idea who they had mistaken him for. Perhaps they would have done it to anybody. One of them gripped his ankles with both hands, stared up at him, and vomited copiously on his shoes.

  “Oops!”

  Ashlyme was disgusted. He ignored them and walked on, but they followed him, trying out of curiosity to prise his easel from under his arm.

  “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” he told them fiercely, avoiding their great sheepish blue eyes; they groaned and nodded. They accompanied him in his fashion about a hundred steps toward Mynned, winking conspiratorially when they thought he wasn’t looking. Then they seemed to remember something else.

  “Fincher’s!” they shouted.

  They began to pelt each other furiously with fruit and meat.

  “Fincher, make us a pie!”

  They tottered off, falling down and knocking on doors at random.

  Ashlyme quickened his pace. The reek of squashed fruit followed him all the way up to the High City, where his shoes attracted some comment.

  Who were these drunken brothers? It is not certain. They owned the city, or so they claimed. They had come upon it, they said, during the course of a mysterious journey. (Sometimes they claimed to have created it, in one day, from nothing but the dust which blows through the low hills of Monar. Millennia had passed since then, they explained.) At first they appeared in a quite different form: two figures materialising once or twice a decade in the sky above the Atteline Plaza of the city, huge and unrealistic like lobsters in their scarlet armour, staring down in an interested fashion. Mounted on vast white horses, they had moved through the air like a constellation, fading away over a period of hours.

  Now they lived somewhere in the High City with a Mingulay dwarf. They were trying to become human.

  This is a game to them, or seems to be, wrote Ashlyme in his diary: a curiousand violent one. Not a night passes without some drunken imbroglio. They hang about all day in the pissoir of some wineshop, carving their initials in the plaster on the walls, and after dark race along the Margarethestrasse stuffing themselves with noodles and pies which they vomit up all over the steps of the Mausoleum of Cecilia Metalla at midnight.

  Were they responsible for the city’s present affliction? Ashlyme had always blamed them. If they really are the lords of the city, he wrote, they are unreliable ones, with their “Chinese take-away” and their atrocious argot.

  While the Barley brothers wrestled with their new humanity, the plague was lapping at the foot of the High City like a lake. An air of inexplicable dereliction spread across the entire Artists’ Quarter. The churchyards were full of rank marguerites, the streets plastered with torn political posters. Dull ironic laughter issued from the Bistro Californium and the Luitpold Cafe. In the mornings old women stared with expressions of intense intelligence into the windows of pie shops along the Via Gellia in the rain. While, up in the High City and all down the hill below Alves, dismayed servants were pulled across the roads by dogs like wolves on jewelled leashes. These were the secret agents of the Barley brothers. Everyone knows them, Ashlyme told his journal. They pretend to be harassed and have receding hair, pretend to be exercising these gigantic dogs. On whom are they spying? To whom do they report? Some say the brothers, some their dwarf, who has recently granted himself the title of “The Grand Cairo.” Now that the Barleys are among us nothing is reliable.

  Other police enforced the quarantine of the affected area. They were strangely apathetic and unpredictable. For a month nobody would see them; suddenly they would put on smart black uniforms and arrest anyone trying to leave the zone, taking them away to undergo “tests.” People detained this way were released erratically and under no obvious system.

  I cannot take them seriously, Ashlyme wrote. Are they police at all?

  They were. The next time he went to see Audsley King they stopped him at the foot of the Gabelline Stairs before he could even enter the zone. It was a new policy.

  They were polite, since he had obviously come down from the High City, but firm. They took his easel from him so that he would not have to be bothered carrying it. They led him back up the steps and into a part of the city which lay behind the fashionable town houses and squares of Mynned, where the woody parks and little lakes, the summery walks and shrubberies of the Haadenbosk merged imperceptibly with that old and slightly sinister quarter which had once been known as Montrouge. Here, they said, he would have a chance to explain himself.

  He looked anxiously
about. In Montrouge the great characteristic towers of the city, with their geometrical inscriptions and convoluted summits, had been allowed to fall into disrepair after some long-forgotten civil war. Their delicate pastels were faded or fire-blackened, their upper storeys inhabited by birds; and though the bustle and commerce of the Margarethestrasse was only a stone’s throw away, no one lived here anymore. When Ashlyme reminded them of this, his custodians only smiled and inquired after the satchel in which he kept his colours and brushes: was it too heavy for him? Soon he began to notice signs of recent construction work, trenches dug across the avenues, walls half-finished among the ragwort and willow herb, low courses of brick lying abandoned amid the excavations. Here and there a raw new building, looking like a town hall or civic centre, had been completed. But no one seemed to be working now, and the majority of the sites lay unfinished, dwarfed and depressed by the ancient structures tottering above them.

  Ashlyme had to go into one of the towers to be questioned. From the outside it looked like a charred log, but it was habitable enough. New wooden partitions, still smelling of carpenter’s glue, had reduced its internal spaces. In the narrow corridors there was a good deal of coming and going. A gloomy, ill-dressed man took charge of Ashlyme and ushered him through a succession of small bare rooms, in each of which he had to explain to different officials why he had been trying to get into the plague zone. They watched him indifferently as he spoke, and his story began to sound feeble and rehearsed.

  Did he not know, they asked him, that the zone was closed? “I’m afraid not. I had a commission there.” Posters had been stuck up on every wall for weeks, they said: had he not noticed them? “Sorry, I’m a portrait painter, you see, and I had a commission in the Low City.” He did not mention Audsley King by name. “I always go in the evening. Shall I have to pay a fine?” They received this bit of naivete emptily. All at once he saw that, having got him there, they didn’t really know what to do with him. Oddly enough this made him even more anxious. They searched his bag perfunctorily, and examined his easel. Suddenly they began asking him questions about the Barley brothers; had he seen them lately in the Low City? Were they with anyone? What was his opinion of them?