Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  “Something had detached itself from the moon and was now making its way toward the earth.

  “I have never heard that demented lonely voice again. But every lunar month since then has seen a fresh launching, a new landing. I have watched them, my lady! They are like puffs of white smoke issuing from the moon’s bony grin; they are like clouds of pollen. They fall to earth here in the empire. I do not know exactly where. My instruments are confused, their findings incomplete and contradictory. They report interference, of a kind not encountered in ten thousand years of operation. But listen: yesterday I spoke with Alstath Fulthor the Reborn Man, in his house above the Artists’ Quarter. From him I learned that some unknown force is harrassing the Reborn communities in the Great Brown Waste. We have agreed—as he would tell you if he were here—that these events must be linked. And though my instruments cannot agree on its location or its origin, they report that a city is being built somewhere in the north and west of Viriconium.

  “My lady, it is not being built by men.”

  Cellur’s eye is like a bird’s, ironic and bright; his profile aquiline. It was different when we thought him human. His expression betrays so little now that we know he is not. Having delivered himself of his revelation, he drinks some wine and looks about him to gauge or enjoy its effect.

  The Queen sits with her calm hands in her lap. At her feet kneels Tomb the Dwarf, his mouth open and his knife forgotten in his hand; he is actually trying to remember something, but it will not come to him until a day or two later. Fay Glass, of the vanished House of Sleth, what is she trying to remember? It is immaterial. She sits singing to an imperturbable sculpture of steel and white light dug up long ago in the ruins of Glenluce, while Galen Hornwrack stands apart—wounds griping, expression cynical and amused. (It’s clear he has forgotten the events of the Bistro Californium, and thinks the old man mad.) Round them hover curtains of mercurial light, bright primary colours flecked for a moment—like flawed but vital ores— with the reflected uncertainties of the room.

  No one knows what to say.

  Viriconium, remarks Ansel Verdigris in his last ironic essay “Allies,” is a world trying to remember itself. The dumb stones perform an unending act of recall. This pervasive awareness of the past, recent or distant, informed the personality of all its rulers, not least that of Methvet Nian. Cellur had pricked old memories back to life. Her mood, when Galen Hornwrack was brought to her in the side chamber or salle she used as a library and sitting room, was already a nostalgic one. This affected her opinion of him, perhaps: although events, in the end, might be said to have borne her out.

  She knew little enough about him. Alstath Fulthor, returning whey-faced and muddy from some unexplained errand only an hour before, had outlined their dependence on him as a witness to the incident in the Low City. “The girl herself found him, by luck or instinct; she insisted that he come with us (though we’d have brought him anyway). It is hard to know why. He seems to have fought on her behalf—and thinks well of himself for it—but he will say nothing about the fate of the message she carried, and that is the important thing. His motives for refusing seem confused.”

  Of Hornwrack’s history he had been reluctant to say anything save, “A disaffected lordling from the midlands near Soubridge. After the war he seems to have wiped the clay off his boots and tried to drink himself to death in the Low City.” Nevertheless, when pressed, he admitted, “Hornwrack was the youngest son. His brothers fell with the rest of Waterbeck’s ploughboys in the Great Brown Waste. His mother and sisters were murdered later, when the Chemosit invested Soubridge. At the outset of the war he was an apprentice airboatman with the prospect of his own command, but he saw no service as such. Initially he was too young, later— with the destruction of its vessels—the whole corps was dismantled. This he appears to regret more than the deaths of his family. After the defeat of the North he seems to have failed as a farmer, and the family estate was forfeit to the Crown when debts made it unworkable. Now he lives by his knife in the Artists’ Quarter, retaining his title perhaps as an advertisement, more likely as an insult to the empire that bestowed it on his grandfather.

  “At the last count he had killed more than eighty men, in High and Low Cities. A dozen are presently trying to kill him.”

  I will at least understand his bitterness, she had thought.

  Now she looked up from a sheet of music as he came in. His demeanour was a sham, or so it seemed to her: he affected the braced instep of the professional dancer; his long grey hair he wore gathered in a steel clasp, in imitation of those doomed airboat captains who had flown their final sorties over the Great Brown Waste at the height of the war; his cloak was the crude meal-coloured garment of the hired bravo, tailored for swagger, its hem dyed with sardonic vulgarity to the exact shade of dried blood. How could he mean anything to her, this ageing assassin with bones as raw as a jeer? He filled the sitting room like a murder. His very existence was too much for her delicate little coralline ornaments and collection of antique musical instruments; he overpowered them at once. It cannot be said that she saw through the Low City and the failed lordling, through the trappings to the man beneath: there was, after all, hardly any of him left to see.

  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 dra
ught 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?”