Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  “Our mission is one of importance,” he told them.

  Eventually one of them said, “This was not the time to come here.” He turned his back and, quietly dismissing the intrusion, vomited up a quantity of seawater. His companion put a placatory hand on his shoulder and reminded him,

  “Captain, they come from the capital—”

  But he only wiped his mouth and laughed wildly. “Ay, and look at them! Some yellow old man, and a woman. Two city lordlings and their dwarf!”

  A fit of dry retching shook him. “There will never be any help from Viriconium,” he said indistinctly. There was self-pity in his voice, and after a moment or two he acknowledged it with a disgusted twist of his mouth. “Did you see anything out there?” he asked, and when the other shook his head, whispered, “I pity those that did.”

  He tried to squeeze the salt water from his hair.

  “One of our own vessels rammed us, that’s certain,” he continued thoughtfully. “But by then we were already burning.”

  He shrugged.

  “It was as usual. Those who saw anything were struck mad immediately. Those who did not, got lost in the mist.”

  Thus the defeated, locked in their dreams of defeat.

  “You are bound to help us!” shouted Alstath Fulthor suddenly.

  “Leave them alone, Fulthor,” advised Hornwrack. Often enough he had been among the defeated himself. His sudden compassion surprised him nevertheless, and that he should recognise it as such surprised him even further. He looked sidelong at Tomb the Dwarf to see if he had noticed anything, but the dwarf wasn’t interested—he only grinned pleasantly and unforgivingly down at the sailors and said, “There is no enemy in sight now.”

  “They are bound by those signatures to help us,” said the Reborn Man less loudly.

  They regarded him with puzzlement, and some scorn.

  “Go up to the new hall,” was all they said, “and leave us alone.” And they wandered off along the quay to where the remaining mast of the foundered ship poked up at a strange angle from a scum of floating wreckage. There a smell of lemons clung, as if some bitter dew had condensed on that doomed hull during its confused final voyage. It was an unearthly, chemical smell. The horses hated it.

  The crowd, sensing a termination, looked on emptily for a minute or two, then began to disperse—the children drawn by a kind of magnetism toward the wreck while their elders took to the cobbled road which wound up into Iron Chine proper, where they vanished in twos and threes among the little two-storey houses with the wet slate roofs, the drying nets, and lines of flaccid laundry. Dulled by the cold and continual privation, they seemed unable to react to a tragedy which, as someone in Fulthor’s party pointed out later, must have involved them all. One woman did stand for a time staring out into the estuary, a few tears drying on her cheeks in the wind. Only then did Hornwrack realise that more than one vessel had been involved. A spatter of rain blew out of the west (where like a great ancient fish there lay in wait the island continent of Fenlen) and into his face. He could see the “new hall” on a rise above the village. He felt wretched.

  “This wind is prising my joints apart,” said Cellur the Birdmaker cheerfully. When no one answered him he gave an impatient shrug. “These people need more help than they could ever give us,” he told Fulthor. “When you stop sulking you will see that.”

  It came on to rain in earnest as they passed through the Chine. The peeling walls had once been gaily whitewashed, the window boxes tended; now pale faces observed them from behind the streaming windows. Higher, they found they could look down into the boatyards of St. Elmo Buffin, from which rose the masts and spars of his white and fated fleet— rakish three-hulled craft fitted with those peculiar slatted metal sails over which rioted orange lizards, green beetles glowing like fresh tattoos, and subtly distorted geometrical figures. Designed by the Afternoon, built by the Evening, blessed by a new madness of both, they were arming for some invisible war. DEATH proclaimed one sail, and LIFE another, in calligraphies rich and outlandish; while on the decks beneath, shipwrights and sailors swarmed like rats.

  “No hint of this war has ever come to us in the High City,” said Alstath Fulthor wonderingly. “It is no wonder they are poverty-stricken here.”

  Higher still, the “new hall” hung above them like a threat. Sombre, columnar, mysterious of purpose, it had about it a most appalling air of age, an age which emptied out the cultural luggage of Alstath Fulthor’s vanished race—all the moral atrocities and philosophical absurdities and expired technologies—and found it meaningless; rendering meaningless in the end even the deserts which were their only legacy to the Evening. As he approached it, wincing from the weather, huddling into his cloak against a wind a million years old, it spoke to Galen Hornwrack from an age fully as naive but by no means as puzzled as his own. It was a survivor of the Morning.

  There was a ramshackle new construction perched on its roof like a greenhouse; from this flags were flying which no one could identify, though Fulthor and the dwarf argued desultorily over their provenance. And down at its ancient front door, his big-knuckled hands clasped like a bunch of dice, stood the solitary principal of that lost maritime demesne, genius of a doomed fleet, St. Elmo Buffin.

  Elmo Buffin, that sad travesty, with his limbs like peeled sticks! He was seven feet tall and a yellow cloak was draped eccentrically about his bony shoulders. Plate armour of a dull-green colour encased him, sprouting all manner of blunt horns and spurs, little nubs and bosses which seemed chitinous and organic. It pulsed and shivered in its colour, for it had come to him from his father, a Reborn Man of the defunct House of medina-Clane, one of the first to be resurrected by Tomb the Dwarf and now dead. What his mother—a dour Northwoman and fishwife of Iron Chine, whose first husband had died in the War of the Two Queens—had bequeathed him is hard to say. Neither strain had bred true, for between Afternoon and Evening there is a great genetic as well as temporal gulf. Epilepsy racked him twice a week. His eyes were yellow and queer in that slack clownish face, which seemed too large for his thin limbs. His brain heaved like the sea; across it visions came and went like the painted sails of his own fleet. Of years he had twenty-six; but his insanity made of that forty or fifty. Since the death of his father (himself an eccentric but principled man, who had consented to the miscegenation in order to cement the two halves of his biracial community) the whole weight of the Chine had rested on his shoulders.

  How many of the villagers actually believed in his invisible enemy, or his experimental fleet? It seems immaterial. Those who died at sea knew the truth, as do we. Those that did not were nonetheless inspired by him. And if it did not thrive, well then, the village survived. Buffin’s success was as a symbol—queasy but enduring—which enabled past and present to collaborate. (His failure lay in underestimation—in being, if you like, not quite mad enough—but that was not to become clear until later, and who anyway could have been quite so mad as to imagine the actual state of affairs?) Now he stood in the doorway of the ancient hall, with its dreadful disregard for the passage of Time and its rooftop contraptions worn with the air of a rakish hat, watching from the corner of his eye Fulthor’s party as it approached. He was dwarfed by the dark columns. He could not keep still. He rubbed his hands to warm them in the cold air. He leant unconcernedly on the doorpost. Then he must look at his feet to admire his boots. Then, muttering to himself, jerk upright and practise a handshake with some imaginary visitor.

  “ ‘News from the city!’ ” they heard him murmur. “Shall I say that? No. I must not appear so anxious. Shall I then enquire (thus, with a politic solicitude), ‘Your journey, it was comfortable?’ Manifestly though, it was not—”

  He snapped his fingers impatiently.

  “Oh, what shall I say!”

  Suddenly he dodged back among the columns and was lost to view. (Though it had no basis, Hornwrack retained for some time an impression of him huddled up there somewhere in the gloom the way a child might huddl
e breathless and white-faced behind the great half-opened doors of some echoing abandoned palace into which it has wandered, that palace being the world.)

  After a moment he called querulously, “Hello?”

  No one answered. Except for Fay Glass they had all got down from their horses and were staring astonished into the massive fluted shadows. Out popped his head like a crumpled leather bag on a stick, and he tapped the side of it mournfully. “We’re all mad here,” he sighed, as if the village, the boatyards, and the ancient stones were all in some way contained within it: which, Hornwrack supposed, in a way they were. Now he recovered himself, smiling ironically, came forward and clasped Fulthor’s hands. “The briefest of aberrations,” he apologised (at this the madwoman pursed her lips enviously, and sniffed); “Please forgive me,” and never referred to it again. “Viriconium has sent observers then, at last!”

  Under this misapprehension he led them up a monstrous flight of stairs. They could not correct it because he would not let them speak. He had, he explained, given up hope of ever getting help from the capital. He did not blame the High City for this. Messengers had been sent every six months to Duirinish, which was the regional centre, but patently the messages had not been sent on. This was understandable. In Duirinish they semed to believe that he was quarrelling with some other coastal village. This had not been at all uncommon in the years immediately following the war. What could he do but maintain a philosophical attitude?

  Up the vast stairs they went behind him, listening to his monologue float down. His laughter was strained. “Still, now you have come—”

  His rooms were full of bald light, strange navigational instruments, clutter. In one room the charts had peeled from the wall and lay all along its foot in odd folds. He took them to a thing like a conservatory built right out on to the roof—“From here I can see twenty miles out to sea.” He smiled proudly, a little pathetically. “I expect you have more profound instruments in the South.” There was a great maze of tubing made of brass into which he invited them to look. They bent one by one to the eyepiece. When it was Hornwrack’s turn to look, all he saw was a sad reticulated greyness, and, suspended indistinctly against it in the distance, something like a chrysalis or cocoon, spinning and writhing at the end of a thread. “Success is slow to come with this particular instrument.” Hornwrack shook his head, but Cellur seemed to be fascinated. As they moved from exhibit to exhibit like reluctant tourists in some artist’s studio, Buffin sat on a stool with his limbs tense. He was like an exhibit himself in the direct odd light filtering through the whitish panes, legs wound tensely round one another, his face like an apologetic bag. “It is not an ordinary telescope.” Out to sea nothing moved.

  The rooms were draughty and seemed deserted. When he ordered refreshments they were brought by an old woman but he served them himself. “Would you like some of this dried herring?” Money and men were his most urgent requirements, he said (there was besides a shortage of timber). The fleet was fitted but under-crewed. “Pardon?” He showed them charts, designs, plans for a strategy they could not comprehend. On these maps an unconventional symbol depicted “mist.” The island continent of Fenlen was not marked. Hornwrack looked for it but he could not find it.

  “The war,” Alstath Fulthor managed to say. “What is its exact nature?”

  Buffin looked surprised.

  “Why, it is precisely as you have seen. That is the extent of it.”

  He thought for a long time. Then he said that his ships went out well-armed. They were captained by crafty men. At sea they encountered first rough water and adverse currents: then a mist. In the mist was some enemy no one had ever seen. “A madness comes over them, and they throw themselves into the water.” Those that did not drown were destroyed by fire, by unimaginable weapons. Some returned. A strange smell clung to their vessels, and they spoke of sounds so appalling as to be beyond description (though they were not loud).

  Fulthor began to show signs of impatience. This sort of conjecture was not to his taste. He looked sideways at Hornwrack, who shrugged. Cellur the Birdmaker, however, had been listening to every word. “Have you ever been attacked on land?” he asked.

  “For ten years now,” Buffin said absently, “we have fought a war we cannot see. Since the death of my father something has been out there.”

  Fulthor stirred, drew in his breath. “I can make nothing of this,” he said brusquely to Cellur. “We cannot concern ourselves with this.”

  Buffin blinked at him and went on, “When the mist rolls inshore at night we can sometimes sense them down there in the fjord, sailing stealthily inland. Where they are going we do not know.” He smiled tiredly. “I’m sorry, the fish is awful.” Momentarily sponged of its lines, his face regained a young and pliant air. “I’m glad you’ve come at last.”

  Fulthor got up. He handed over his safe conducts and his letters of introduction. “Our mission is urgent,” he said. “I should like fresh horses if you have them. Otherwise nothing. I’m sorry we cannot help.”

  There was a silence.

  “That was badly done, Alstath Fulthor,” said Cellur.

  Buffin looked at them both. Sleet tapped the milky panes of the greenhouse. Outside, the wind tossed the strings of pennants, and set to swaying the distant mast tops of the half-completed fleet. A mist was coming in off the sea.

  “I dreamt last night of a fatal blunder made while asleep,” said Cellur as they made their way back up to the clifftop in the blowing sleet. “A sleep-walker murdered his own son.”

  “We have done nothing decent here,” agreed Hornwrack a bit absently. Watching with horror the torment of St. Elmo Buffin, he had suddenly begun to think of his own youth, a faithless season spent in the wet plough of the midlands. He could not quite connect the two except in their antithesis. “That’s certain. Only cooperate in one more High City betrayal.” It was later in the day. They were all mounted on fresh animals. Out of his reverie he gave Alstath Fulthor a look of dislike. (He remembered when it came to it only a touch of dead chrysanthemums on the skin in some still-aired room; rooks sweeping over the heavy earth. What he had taken to be unsentimentality with regard to this had turned out to be quite the reverse. In turn, this caused him to think about the Rue Sepile, and all that implied.)

  “I thought I recalled the man,” Cellur said. “Perhaps it was a story heard long ago. And yet the face was very familiar.”

  “Quite.”

  “I cannot shake off a sense of foreboding.”

  At the top of the cliff, about to turn inland, they were accosted by the spectre of the ancient airboatman. Opening and shutting its mouth like a deformed goldfish, it approached them out of the eddying sleet, rotating slowly about its vertical axis. Although, as before, it appeared to maintain only the most precarious contact with the world, a thin grey snow seemed to be settling on its shoulders, the ghostly precipitate of some foreign continuum. It was agitated. It came very close to Hornwrack and plucked at his cloak. (He felt nothing until he tried to beat it off with the flat of his hands, when there was some slight, gelatinous resistance.)

  “Few lawn!” it shouted through its cupped hands, as from a great distance. “Fog . . . Forn . . . Fenling. Oh, crikey.” It pointed desperately out to sea. It looked inland and shook its head. “FENGLIN! nuktis ’agalma . . . 254 da parte . . . ten cans for a boat load . . . Fengle!”

  And it took up station above his head like a fat angel, staring tragically backwards as they moved inland and signing madly whenever it caught his eye.

  Still later, Tomb the Dwarf rode up to his side. He held out the weapon Hornwrack had lost on the quayside.

  “You dropped your sword, soldier.”

  Hornwrack said bitterly, “Listen, old Dwarf, I thought I had got rid of that. I am not him. Whatever he was to you. Don’t you understand that?”

  The dwarf grinned and shrugged, still holding the sword out expectantly.

  Hornwrack looked up at the thing floating above him. Seeing th
is, it steered itself rapidly toward him, clearing its throat. He groaned, accepted the sword. Both his spectres had returned to haunt him.

  The weather now changed. Low cloud and sleet rolled away east and south to be replaced by a pale sky and good visibility. A wind like a razor blew from the north. On a succession of bright but bitterly cold days they penetrated the habitable margin of the Great Brown Waste, to find a frozen crust over deep, wet peat. Progress was slow. If a bird called, tak tak, like an echo in a stony gully, the madwoman followed it with her eyes, tilting her head, smiled. She was nervous, but now rode ahead of Alstath Fulthor. She had led them into a region of high dissected plateaux over which hummed the icy wind, and then cast about over the bleak hillsides for a while like a lost bitch. Little paths ran everywhere, contouring the salients. As far as anyone could make out she followed them randomly. They led her in the end to a stone-crowned, steep-streamed escarpment which sheltered among its boulder fields sparse woods of stunted oak. On its lower slopes might be discerned the lanes and enclosures of a settlement, the walls toppled, the sheepfolds in poor repair. Behind the village rose the eroded shapes of the Agdon Roches, from which it took its name: a string of gritstone outcrops quarried long ago for building stone so that they formed a succession of bays and shattered promontories.

  “This is a vile bloody place.”

  Hornwrack: Paucemanly’s ghost had left him alone for a while, vanishing with a wet pop and a feeble grin as if remembering a prior appointment. He was relieved, but found himself with nothing to think about but the cold. He was used to the city, where winter is episodic. The wind whistles across the junction of the Rue Sepile and Vientiane Avenue. The women clutch their shawls tightly and dash laughing from house to house. There is always a window to watch them from while you drink mulled wine prepared by a boy. Not so here: his fingers were welded to the reins like the fingers of a stone horseman falling apart in some provincial square. He had been miserable for days.