The Pastel City v-1

by M. John Harrison 1971

  But the Queen said, 'it is Carron Ban who has my sympathy. Women are more used to betrayal than men, but take it deeper.'

  It is the urgent and greedy desire of all wastes to expand and eat up more fertile lands: this extension of their agonised peripheries lends them a semblance of the movement and life they once possessed. As if seeking protection from the slow southward march of the Rust Desert, Ruined Drunmore huddled against an outfiung spur of the Monar Mountains.

  In this, it failed, for drifts of bitter dust topped its outer walls, spilling and trickling into the streets below every time a wind blew.

  The same winds scoured its streets, and, like an army of indifferent house-keepers, swept the sand through the open doors and shattered roofs of the inner city, choking every abandoned armoury and forge and barracks. The erosion of half a millennium had etched its cobbled roads, smoothed and blunted the outlines of its ruins, until its once-proud architecture had become vernacular, fit for its equivocal position between the mountains and the Waste.

  Even as a ruin, Drunmore was pitiful: Time and geography had choked itto death.

  Towards the end of the flight, a wide rift had appeared suddenly in the deck of the airboat, exposing the ancient engines. Now, as they hovered over the city, flecks of coloured light, small writhing worms of energy, rose up out of the crack, clung to the metal surfaces of the command-bridge, fastened on the inert carcass of the mechanical vulture, and clustered about the Queen's rings.

  Tomb grew nervous. 'Corpse lights,'he muttered. He brought the machine down in Lnuthos Plaza, the four-acre field of Time-polished granite from which Borring had organised the destruction of Drunmore so many generations before.

  Grif and Cromis dragged the dead courier from his ruined ship and buried him in a deep drift of loess on the southern side of the Plaza. It was a queer and sombre business. The Queen looked on, her cowl pulled forward, her cloak fluttering. They were impelled to work slowly, for they had only their hands for shovels. As they completed the interment, great white sparks began to hiss and crackle between the shattered crystal hull and the surrounding buildings.

  'We would be wiser out of this,'suggested Tomb, who had been carrying out salvage work, as was his nature, and promptly rushed back into the wreckage to steal more tools and retrieve his exoskeleton. After that, they made their way through the bone-smooth streets until Grif could walk no further, the damp wind mourning about them and Tomb's armour clanking funereally as he dragged it along.

  Under the one unbroken roof that remained (like a static stone haunting, like a five-hundred year memory) in the city, amid piles of dust younger than the Waste but older than the empire, they lit a fire and prepared a meal from the miserable stores of the wrecked machine. Shadows danced crudely, black on the black walls. The sun had gone down in a gout of blood.

  At the prompting of some impulse he did not quite understand, Cromis had rescued the corpse of Cellur's bird from the ship. While they ate, he explained its nature to the Young Queen, and Tomb probed its mechanisms with a tlmin steel knife.

  '… We know nothing more of this man. But by sending the bird, he warned us – the fact that I did not heed the warning in no way devalues it – of the geteit chemosit. It may be that he has some way of dealing with them.'

  Birkin Grif chewed a strip of dried meat. He laughed.

  'That is pure conjecture,'he said.

  'It is the only hope we have. Grif. There is nothing else.'

  'He is very clever with his hands,'cackled Tomb the dwarf, poking at the innards of the bird. He thought for a moment. 'Or, like Canna Moidart, good at digging.'

  'So, if you do not object, My Lady, we will travel to Girvan Bay and solicit his aid. Should there be some secure place to which we can deliver you first -'

  'Places do not guarantee security, Lord Cromis, only people – 'Here, she smiled at him '- a thing we have both learned recently, I think – 'He reflected ruefully that it was unwise to forget the astuteness of the House of Methven '- and, besides, I have been safe for seventeen years. I think I would like to be at risk for a while.'

  A huge, urgent lurching motion manifested itself on the other side of the fire like a local geological disturbance. Birkin Grif had heaved himself to his feet. He looked down at the Young Queen, mumbling subterraneanly to himself. He bowed from the waist.

  'Madam,'he said, 'You have the courage of your father. That is a brave attitude.'He sat down again. 'Mind you,'he added in a low voice to Tomb, 'it's a bloody long trip for a man in my condition.'

  Queen Jane of Viriconium laughed for the first time since she had lost her empire. Which shows at least, thought Cromis, the resilience of youth. He did not mean to condescend.

  They stayed in that city for five days. A processing-centre in the heyday of the Northmen, perhaps it welcomed the ring of Tomb's hammer as he worked on his damaged armour – a loop in Time, a faint, distorted echo from a past in which other mechanics had beaten the subtle artefacts of the Afternoon Cultures into cruder, more vital forms.

  Grif's leg was slow to heal; exertion reopened it; the blood seemed slow to clot, and he found walking difficult. Like a convalescing child, he was prone to brief, silly rages. He limped and fretted about, railling at his own limitations. Finally, he forced himself to walk to the wreck in Luthos Plaza, tear a slim cobalt girder from the destroyed enginehousing, and bend it into a crutch.

  It was an unfortunate admission. His gait thereafter was laborious, unsteady – and Tomb, a cruel humourist, imitated it gleefully, stumbling and capering like a crippled acrobat. That parody was a horrid work of art. Grif lost his temper, and implied that the power-armour was a less respectable kind of crutch. They went for one another murderously, all hooked hands and cunning blows, and had to be separated forcibly. They took to cutting each other dead in the bleak streets.

  'You are preposterous,'Cromis told them.

  To Methvet Nian he said, 'They are bored with inaction, we will leave here tomorrow;'but later that day two airboats bearing the Moidart's sigil ghosted in off the Waste and hung over the Plaza. Northmen swarmed down rope ladders to examine the burnt-out launch, kicked noisily through the wreckage, looking for souvenirs.

  Cromis took his small party to earth in the archaic suburbs of Drunmore. But it became apparent that the airborne force was the vanguard of an attempt to re-occupy the city after half a millennium's absence; so they left the place that night, and went undetected into the cold spaces of the Pass of Methedrin.

  They began their journey down the Rannoch:

  It was a land of immense, barely-populated glacial moors, flanked by the tall hills – of bogs and peat-streams – of granite boulders split from the Mountains of Monar during slow, unimaginable catastrophes of ice, deposited to wear away in the beds of wide, fast, shallow rivers;

  Of bright green moss, and coarse, olive-green grass, and delicate, washed-out winter flowers discovered suddenly in the lee of low, worn drumlins – of bent thorn and withered bullace, of damp prevailing winds that searched for voices in stands of birch and pine;

  Of skylines, wrinkled with ridges;

  Of heather and gorse, grey cloud and weather - of sudden open stretches of white water that would swell in Spring, dwindle and vanish with the coming of Summer – mysterious waterways;

  It was green and brown, green and grey; it grew no crops; it constituted one quarter of the Empire of Viriconium.

  At dawn each day, Cromis would leave his blankets, shivering, to inspect whatever snares he had set the night before:

  generally, he caught rabbits and waterlogged his boots: but he took a morose pleasure in these solitary outings. Something in the resigned, defeated landscape (or was it simply waiting to be born? Who can tell at which end of Time these places have their existence?) called out to his senses, demanded his attention and understanding.

  He never found out what it was. Puzzling, he would return with his catch, to wake the camp and initiate another day of walking.

  They wer
e a ragged crew, a queer crew to be walking down the Rannoch like that: Tomb crucified in his leather leggings against the metal tree of his exoskeleton, never tiring, going like a machine over bog and river, leaping ravines and cutting down whole spinneys with his axe; Birkin Grif in the ruins of his splended cobalt mail, hopping and lurching, cursing his crutch like a mad scarecrow; Cromis, his beautiful black hair lank in the damp wind, the dead metal bird dangling limply by its neck from his belt, stopping to gaze at waterworn stone by the hour -And Methvet Nian in her purple cloak, discovering a portion of her lost Empire, and of herself. 'Towers are not everything, Lord Cromis!'she laughed, and she took his arm. 'They are not!'She brought him flowers and was disappointed when he could not identify them for her. He showed her crows and mountains, and expected no identification at all. He smiled; he was not used to that. They were thrown together by small observations.

  In this way, they covered twenty miles a day.

  During the third week, it snowed. Ice crusted the rivers, rock cracked and broke above the thousand-foot line of the flanking hills. Cromis found his traps full of white hares and albino foxes with red, intelligent eyes. Birkin Grif killed a snow-leopard with his crutch: for ferocity, it was an even match until the last blow.

  For a week, they lived with a community of herders, small, dark-haired folk with strange soft accents, to whom the war in the north and west was but a rumour. They gave the Queen a sheepskin coat, they were shy and kind. As a measure of gratitude, Tomb the dwarf cut wood from dawn to dusk; while Grif sat with his bad leg stretched in front of him, and split it into enough kindling for a year (they became friends again as a result of this: neither of them loved anything better than cutting and chopping).

  Everything began to seem distant: the snow was an insulator: Cromis forced himself to keep in mind the defeat in the North. It was important to his brooding nature that he remember the terrible blades of the geteit chemosit. He imagined them. He saw them lay seige to Duirinish in his head. Would the winter halt them at all?

  After seven days of that, and a further fortnight of travel in the grim mountains at the southern end of the Rannoch, he was glad to see the arable lands around Lendalfoot and catch a glimpse at last of the grey sea breaking on the dark volcanic beaches of Girvan Bay.

  Lendalfoot was a fishing town built of pale fawn stone, a cluster of one-roomed cottages and long drying-sheds, their edges weathered, blurred by accumulations of moss and lichen. Here and there rose the tall white houses of local dignitaries. In the summer, fine pink sand blown off the shifting dunes of Girvan Bay filled its steep, winding streets; the fishwives argued bare-armed in the sun; and creaking carts carried the catch up the Great South Road into Soubridge.

  But now the waves bit spitefully the shingle beach. The sea heaved, the mad black gulls fought over the deserted deep-water jetties, and the moored boats jostled one another uneasily.

  Determined that news of the Young Queen should not travel North by way of the fish-route, Cromis sent Tomb into Lendal-foot to pose as a solitary 'traveller and gather certain information (he stumped off sulkily, stripped of his power-armour so as not to alarm the fishermen, but refusing to give up his axe) then retired with Methvet Nian and Birkin Grif to a barren basalt hill behind the town.

  The dwarf returned jauntily, throwing up and catching a small, wizened apple, which had been given to him (he said) by an old woman. 'She was as dried up as her fruit,'he laughed. 'She must have thought I was a child.'More likely, he had stolen it.

  'It was a good thing I went alone: they are frightened and surly down there. News has come down the road to Soubridge.'He crunched the apple. 'The Moidart has taken Low Leedale, thrown down Duirinish – with great loss of life – and now marches on Viriconium.

  'Between the Pastel City and Soubridge, the geteit chemosit are abroad by night, killing with no reason.'

  He ate the apple core, spat the pips impudently at Birkin Grif – who was sharpening his sword with a piece of sandstone he kept in his belt for that purpose – and lay down on his exoskeleton. 'They have given me directions, more or less precise.'He strapped himself up, rose to his feet, once more a giant. He pointed out over the basalt cliffs, his motors humming.

  'Our goal lies East and a little inland. The fishermen cooled further toward me when they learnt of my destination: they have little like of this Cellur. He is seen rarely, an old man. They regard him superstitiously, and call him “The Lord of the Birds”.'

  Chapter Eight

  In each of them had grown a compulsion to avoid roads and centres of population: by this, they were driven to travel the wilderness that stretches from Lendalfoot to the Cladich Marshes; a hinterland ruined and botched when the Afternoon Cultures were nothing but a dream in the germ-plasm of an ape; a stony wreckage of deep ravines and long-dormant volcanic vents.

  'It is a poor empire I have,'said Methvet Nian, 'win or lose. Everywhere, the death of the landscape. In miniature, the end of the world.'

  No one answered her, and she drew her hood over her face.

  It had not snowed in the South, but a continual rain lashed the grey and leafless vegetation, glossed the black basalt and pumice, and made its way in the form of agitated streams through the ravines to the sea. At night, electrical flares danced about the summits of the dead volcanoes, and the columnar basalt formations took on the aspect of a giant architecture.

  As they went, they were shadowed and haunted by birds -ominous cruciform silhouettes high against the angry sky.

  They reached the tower of Cellur in the evening of the second day. Cresting a ridge of pitted dolerite, they came upon the estuary of one of the unnamed rivers that runs from the mountains behind Cladich. Luminous in the fading light, the water spread itself before them like a sheet of metal. High black escarpments dropped sheer to its dark beaches; the cold wind made ephemeral, meaningless patterns on its surface.

  Set in the shallows near the western bank was a small domed island, joined to the mainland by a causeway of crumbling stone blocks. It was barmen but for a stand of white, dead pines.

  Out of the pines, like a stone finger diminished by distance, rose the tower. It was five-faced, tapering: black. A tiny light shone near its summit, a glow that flickered, came and went. Birds wheeled about it, wailing mournfully, dipping to skim the water – fish-eagles of a curious colour, with wings like cloaks in a gale.

  'There is nothing for us here,'said Birkin Grif abruptly. 'Only a lunatic would choose to live here. Those fishermen had the right of it.'

  But Cromis, who understood isolation, and was reminded of his own tower among the rowans, of Balamacara, shook his head. 'It is what we came for, Grif. Those birds: look, they are not made of flesh.'He touched the corpse of the iridium vulture hanging from his belt. 'We will go down.'

  The estuary was filled with a brown, indecisive light, the island dark and ill-defined, enigmatic. The creaking of the dead pines came clearly across the intervening water on the wind. From a beach composed of fine basalt grit and littered with skull-sized lumps of volcanic glass, they mounted the causeway. Its stones were soapy and rotten; parts of it were submerged under a few inches of water.

  They were forced to go in single file, Cromis bringing up the rear. As they drew nearer the island, Tomb the dwarf un-limmmbered his axe; and Grif, drawing his broadsword a little way out of its scabbard, scowled about him as if he suspected a conspiracy against his person on the part of the landscape.

  With damp feet, they stood before the tower.

  It had been formed in some unimaginable past from a single obsidian monolith two hundred feet long by seventy or eighty in diameter; raised on its end by some lost, enormous trick of engineering; and fused smoothly at its base into the bedrock of the island. Its five facets were sheer and polished; in each was cut twenty tall, severe windows. No sound came from it; the light at its summit had vanished; a stony path led through the ghostly pines to its door.

  Tomb the dwarf chuckled gently to himself. 'They built
to last,'he said proudly to Cromis, as if he had personally dug the thing up from a desert: 'You can't deny that.'He strutted between the trees, his armour silver and skeletal in the dusk. He reversed his axe and thundered on the door with its haft.

  'Come out!'he shouted: 'Come out!'He kicked it, and his metal leg rang with the blow; but no one came. Up above their heads, the fish-eagles made restless circles. Cromis felt Methvet Nian draw closer to him. 'Come on out, Birdmaker!'called Tomb. 'Or I'll chop your gate to matchwood,'he added. 'Oh, I'll carve it!'

  Soft but distinct in the silence that followed this threat, there came a dry, reedy laugh.

  Birkin Grif cursed foully. 'At your backs!'he bellowed, lugging out his heavy blade. Horrified by his own lack of foresight, Cromis turned to meet the threat from behind. Sweat was on his brow, the nameless sword was in his hand. Up above, the fish-eagles gyred like ghosts, screaming. The pathway through the pines yawned – a tunnel, a trap, a darkness. He aimed a savage overhand stroke in the gloom, a cut that was never completed.

  It was CelIur of Lendalfoot who stood there, the Birduaker.

  The Lord Of The Birds was so old that he seemed to have outstripped the mere physical symptoms of his age and passed into a Timelessness, a state of exaltation.

  His long, domed skull was fleshless, but his skin was smooth and taut and unwrinkled; so fine and tight as to be almost translucent. His bones shone through it, like thin and delicate jade. It had a faint, yellow tint; in no way unhealthy, but strange.

  His eyes were green, clear and amused; his lips were thin.

  He wore a loose, unbelted black robe – quilted in grouped arrangements of lozenges – upon which was embroidered in gold wire patterns resembling certain geometries cut into the towers of the Pastel City: those queer and uneasy signs that might equally have been the visual art or the language or the mathematics of Time itself.

  They had this property: that, when he moved, they seemed to shift and flow of their own accord, divorced entirely from the motions of 'the cloth of which they were a part.