Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  The Grand Cairo laughed scornfully.

  “Never mention those brothers to me!” he exclaimed. He shook his head, staring into space. “I argued all along against us coming down here, even in defeat—” He rubbed his hands over his eyes. “Look at them now!”

  He refilled Ashlyme’s glass, emptied his own.

  “Oh, it was hand-to-mouth in those days, it was catch-as-catch-can. You should have seen some of the lads I had with me then; they’d kill a cow with their bare hands! It’s all very well for you to be frightened of those imbeciles downstairs: after all, they’re here to frighten civilians. But not one of them would have lasted a week up there. Not one of them.” He examined this idea with morose satisfaction. “Don’t you worry about them. This is a scheme that can’t go wrong!” He leaned forward enthusiastically and took Ashlyme’s hands. “Imagine the scene—

  “Three muffled figures, heavily armed and disguised, support a fourth. (She is unable to walk unaided. Her face is pitiable, pinched, almond white, framed in a great collar of wolf’s fur. Under her skin are fine mauve veins like those the clematis sometimes displays beneath its flower. Her eyes are as blue as phosphorus in the gloom.) Like ghosts they cross the end of an alley, passing in silence in the deep night, and make their way stealthily from gravestone to gravestone across Allman’s Heath, down to the waters of the Pleasure Canal. Will the boatman be waiting, as he promised? Or has he been enlisted by their enemies? They are almost home now. But wait! Out of the mist at the water’s edge comes the pursuit! Now they must fight!”

  A dreamy, excited expression had settled on the dwarf’s face. He got up and mimicked the weariness of the conspirators, taking the part of each in turn, then the curious lurching gait of the sick woman. He let his eyelids fall half-closed and said in a kind of shrieking falsetto, “I can go no further.” He collapsed, and caught himself before he fell to the ground. He pulled forth an imaginary knife and looked warily about. This pantomime took him all round the room and up to a huge wardrobe of black pear wood, its mouldings disfigured where he had struck matches on them. As he reached this he turned towards Ashlyme the sexless, ageless glance of the obsessed, full of incomprehensible irony; and at the word fight, he opened it with a quick, powerful tug.

  It was full of weapons of all kinds: clubs, truncheons, and loaded wooden coshes; miséricordes and stilettos, with and without sheaths; knuckle-dusters studded and spiked, trick knives whose blades shot out on springs, and strangling cords made of silk or cheese wire, all hanging in rows from pegs. Most of this stuff seemed rusty and ill-kept, although at one time it had been in almost daily use. In a wooden rack were three bottles made of deep blue glass, which had once contained acids. Some rotten-smelling objects in the bottom of the cupboard turned out to be potatoes and cakes of scented soap into which had been embedded bits of broken glass; among them were other homemade devices of less obvious purpose. The dwarf took them out one by one and laid them on the floor, knives in one place, garrotes in another. He beckoned Ashlyme closer.

  “Come on,” he said. “Have anything you want. We must go prepared.”

  Ashlyme stared at him dry-mouthed. The dwarf made encouraging sounds. Eventually Ashlyme picked up the smallest knife he could find. It had a curious flaw halfway up the blade. The dwarf started a little when he saw Ashlyme had picked that particular one; but he soon recovered himself and told several stories about it. “I got that knife on Fenlen Island in the North,” he said. “There was blood on that knife from the moment I had it.” But this was said with such unconvincing bravado that Ashlyme was sure he had simply stolen it from the Barley brothers years ago, and was glad to get rid of it now in case they found out.

  Ashlyme was to grow used to this weapon, sharpening his pencils with it, and sometimes fingering the flaw in its blade, which was quite unlike rust and had a satisfying texture to the ball of the thumb: but that night he took it home in horror, wondering what would become of him.

  Emmet Buffo lived at the top of an old house at Alves, halfway up the famous hill (the summit of which had interfered with many of his most radical and innovatory observations). Alves was a curious place. It was a windy salient or polyp of the High City flung out into the Low, partaking of the character of both. While its streets were wider than those of the Artists’ Quarter, they were no less shabby. Strange old towers rose from a wooded slope clasped in a curved arm of the derelict Pleasure Canal. About their feet clustered the peeling villas of a vanished middle class, all plaster mouldings, split steps, tottering porticos, and drains smelling of cats. Ashlyme trudged up the hill. A bell clanged high up in a house; a face moved at a window. The wind whirled dust and dead leaves round him.

  While he waited for the astronomer to open his door, he thought of Audsley King’s most popular watercolour, “On the bridge at New Man’s Staithe.”

  In this view of Alves a honey-coloured light seems to rise from the glassy waters of the abandoned canal and enfold the hill behind, giving its eccentric architecture a mysterious familiarity, like buildings seen in a dream. The towers, their pastel colours thickened romantically, glow like stained glass.

  Ashlyme smiled. A print of this picture hung in every salon in the High City. The question most frequently asked about it was: “This unmoving figure at the parapet of the bridge, is it male or female?” Audsley King would answer: “I did not intend you to know.” She had painted it during a love affair sixteen years before. She now disowned its dreamy lights and sentimentality. “It is untruthful,” she complained. “Yet they love it so!”

  Emmet Buffo put his head round the door and blinked.

  “Come in, come in!” he said.

  He took Ashlyme’s hand as if he had never seen him before, and, under the impression that he had been sent from some committee to explore the funding of a new telescope, led him up the stairs. He had, he explained, almost given up hope of ever getting money for his experiments. He did not blame the High City for this. “Every six months I go to the patents office and sit for an hour, perhaps two, on the benches with all the others. I understand the needs of the bureaucracy. I understand its inertia. What can I do but maintain a philosophical attitude?”

  Up the stairs went Ashlyme behind him, listening to this monologue float down, unable to find any opportunity to speak and in any case hardly knowing what to say. There were pockets of dust in the corners of the landings.

  “Still,” said Buffo. “They’ve sent you. That’s something!”

  He laughed.

  He lived in a kind of penthouse, much of which he had built himself. It was cold there even in summer. In one room he cooked his food and slept; it was tidy, but a stale smell hung in the air about the low iron bed and the homemade washstand. He ground his lenses in another smaller room. Little pieces of coloured glass like the petals of anemones littered a table, some set in complex frames made of whitish metal. The astronomical charts had peeled that morning from the wall and lay in folds at its foot. (Mouldy patterns in the plaster suggested that another universe had been hidden behind them.) “It’s the damp,” apologised Buffo. He showed Ashlyme around like a tourist in the Margarethestrasse. “This is my ‘exterior brain,’ ” he said. “I call it that. I can refer to it at any time. It’s more than just a library.” He indicated an ordinary set of shelves on which were arranged reference books and instruments, models of telescopes and bits of paper with technical drawings on them.

  The adjoining room, where he spent most of his time, was a flimsy structure like a greenhouse, with a complicated system of ratchets and rods that enabled him to lift its roof and poke out his telescopes. It was composed of odd panes of glass, some coloured, some milky; they were cracked, and of different sizes.

  “This is the observatory itself. From here I can see twenty miles in any direction.”

  Ashlyme looked out. A quarter of the sky was obscured by the bulk of Alves, with the cracked, threatening copper dome of the old palace askew on it like a crown. From the other side he could l
ook down across the Pleasure Canal at the famous graves on Allman’s Heath. “It was built to my own design, ten years ago,” said Buffo. It was full of contraptions. As Ashlyme moved from one to the other, pretending not to have seen them before, Buffo sat on a stool. But he couldn’t sit still. He hopped to his feet to explain, “These are the plans for the new device,” and sat down again. He was like an exhibit himself in the odd light.

  One of the contraptions was a maze of copper tubing into which Buffo had let two or three eyepieces, apparently at random. Ashlyme bent to look through one of them. All he saw was a sad reticulated greyness, and, suspended indistinctly against it in the distance, something like a chrysalis or cocoon, spinning at the end of its thread. Buffo smiled shyly. “Success is slow to come with that one,” he admitted. “You’ll agree it has vast potential, though?” He went on to explain his experimental method, but soon saw that Ashlyme didn’t understand. He left the observatory for a moment and came back with a tray. “Would you like some wine? Some of these pilchards?” Thankfully, Ashlyme sat down and took some. They ate in silence. When he had finished, Ashlyme rubbed his hand over his face.

  “Buffo,” he said. “You know it’s me, not some clerk from the patents office. It’s Ashlyme. I’ve seen all this a hundred times before.”

  “Pardon?” Buffo stared at him, his expression changing slowly. “I suppose you have,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose you have.” He sighed. “I expect I knew all along really. I’m sorry, old chap.”

  Ashlyme explained how he had become entangled with the Grand Cairo.

  “Now this dwarf wants to come with us to the Rue Serpolet,” he told Buffo. “He won’t take no for an answer. What are we going to do?”

  Buffo looked bleakly round the observatory.

  “You wake from one nightmare into the next,” he said in a quiet voice. He inspected the palm of his hand as if it was his whole life. “I’m sorry, this fish is awful. Leave it if you like.” Suddenly he laughed and pushed his plate on the floor with a clatter. “We must lay new plans then!” he exclaimed. He touched Ashlyme’s arm. “Come on, Ashlyme, it cheers me up just to see you!”

  He had an idea already, he continued. “Let him push the handcart if he is so keen to come! We need someone to do that, after all; and it’s our plan, not his.”

  Ashlyme wiped the condensation off a pane of glass and looked out. The Artists’ Quarter was barely three hundred yards away across the Pleasure Canal and Allman’s Heath. He stared at the dark loop of water, the jumble of roofs to the west, the leaning gravestones that filled the heath between. (Had Audsley King set her easel up among them to paint “On the bridge at New Man’s Staithe,” anemones and sol d’or burning at her feet? Now the graveyard was full of briars and plaster dust blown in from the senseless renovations on Endingall Street and de Monfreid Square.) The canal was quite shallow. You could see the bottom on a sunny day. They had intended to wade it after the rescue, and bring Audsley King directly to Alves. His long experience of conspiracies had enabled the dwarf to guess this immediately.

  “I don’t think he would be content with that, Buffo. Even if we could persuade him, he is untrustworthy. He is subject to moods, fits of enthusiasm, distempers, sudden hatreds. He is in love with plots. Even his masters, the Barley brothers, he believes, are plotting against him.”

  “Never mind,” said Buffo. “We’ll think of something.”

  He went out for a minute and came back with what looked like a bundle of rags, wrapped around something more solid.

  “Don’t look for a moment,” he said.

  Ashlyme was forced to smile. He closed his eyes; ran his tongue round the inside of his mouth to dislodge a piece of pilchard. When he opened his eyes again he saw Buffo standing there wearing a kind of varnished rubber mask. It covered his head completely, and resembled the stripped and polished skull of a horse, two pomegranates set in the empty sockets to simulate eyes. It was ludicrous. Buffo had taken off his clothes and wound strips of green swaddling round his body. His arms were like sticks, his rib cage huge. Two great branched feathery horns came up out of the forehead of the mask. He did not look human.

  “They’re rather well done, aren’t they?” he said, his voice muffled by the rubber which was forced down over his nose. “Don’t you want to look at yours?” He had another mask in his outstretched hand.

  Ashlyme backed away. “No,” he said. “I don’t want to see it. Why must we dress like that?”

  “I thought the old man had done rather well. We will look just like beggars. No one will recognise us!” He pounced on Ashlyme and took him by the shoulders. He whirled him round and round in a clumsy dance. “What an idea!” he crowed. “What a success!”

  Ashlyme was helpless. The skull of the horse was thrust into his face. It was hard to believe that Buffo’s familiar features were somewhere beneath it. He was as frightened by the strength of the astronomer’s thin arms as he was by the sound of breath sobbing in and out of the mask. Then he began to laugh despite himself.

  “Well done, Buffo!”

  Buffo, encouraged, sang a lively but mawkish popular song. They finished the bottle of wine and even the pilchards. The sun set. Crowing and singing, they pranced about the observatory, bumping into things and falling down, until they were exhausted.

  Later, with the proper fall of night, the observatory became cold and uninhabitable; but the two men sat on, talking at first, then contemplating their plan in a companionable silence. They discussed the future. Buffo would move out of Alves and into the High City, where he believed his work would be better appreciated; Ashlyme would share his studio with Audsley King and they would do great work together. The flimsy structure of the greenhouse creaked around them as the wind rose. Damp air blew through the cracked panes, giving Ashlyme the impression of motion, of racing travel through some ramshackle but benign dimension. Where would they end up? He smiled over at Buffo. The astronomer’s head had sunk on to his chest; he had fallen asleep with his mouth open and begun to snore. Turned down, the lamps emitted a queer crepuscular light. Ashlyme got his cloak and folded it about him. It was too late to go home. Besides, he felt somehow responsible for the astronomer, who looked even more honest asleep than he did awake. He wandered about for a while, squinting into the eyepieces of the telescopes. Then he sat down and dozed. Once or twice he woke up suddenly, thinking about the pile of clothes and masks on the floor.

  For a week he felt debauched and bilious, uninclined to commit himself. Was the dwarf still having him watched? Was Emmet Buffo a broken reed? The plague, he wrote in his diary, permeates all our decisions, like a fog. He put the rescue attempt off again and again, and for the most part stayed in his studio, watching morosely as the unseasonable rain swept across the Low City and lashed the fronts of the houses at Mynned. This summer is a travesty, he wrote, as if the trivial might allow him to forget his situation. And, on finding water among his belongings in the attic, I am appalled, but it is my own fault. I have not repaired the roof. Neither had he repaired his opinion of the High City art cliques. Is anything worthwhile being done? In short, no: up here it is all dinner arrangements and affaires. Rack has had the set designs for The Dreaming Boys for two months now, yet there have been no auditions, no readings. He wishes (he says) “to consult the artist”; but he never goes to the Low City.

  He could not work on the portrait of Audsley King. Instead he began framing the pictures she had given him. He discovered with delight the early landscape “A fire this Wednesday at Lowth,” and what appeared to be an incomplete gouache of the notorious “Self-portrait half clothed,” in which the artist is seen peering slyly into a mirror, her long hands touching her own private parts. He hung the paintings in different places to find the best light and stood in front of them for long periods, thrilled by the stacked planes of the landscapes, the disquieting eros of her inner world.

  At last an oblique sunshine broke through the clouds above the city and filled it with a shifting, fitful br
ightness. There was a rush to the banks of the Pleasure Canal. The High City emptied itself onto Lime Walk and the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves, and there, in audacious proximity to the plague zone, took the sun.

  Little iron tables were set up and the women drank tea out of porcelain “lucid as a baby’s ear”; while those poets who had escaped exile in the Californium and the Luitpold Café recited in musical voices. Everyone had a theory about the plague. Everyone had it from a reliable source. Most agreed it would never reach the High City. Imagine the scene! The women had on their muslin dresses. The men wore swords and meal-coloured cloaks copied carefully from those fashionable among the Low City mohocks two or three centuries before. A wet silvery light fell delicately on the white bridges, limning the afternoon curve of the canal and perfectly disguising its shabbiness. Everyone enjoyed themselves thoroughly; while down below, among the ragwort on the towpath, writhed the thousand-and-one black and yellow caterpillars of the cinnabar moth, some fat and industrious, rearing up their blunt, ugly heads, others thin and scruffy and torpid. The Barley brothers ate them and were sick.

  Ashlyme, who had been out buying mastic, wandered onto the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves and could not find his way off again. The crowds confused him. He ran into Paulinus Rack, who was sitting at a table with Livio Fognet, the lithographer, and their patron the Marchioness “L.” A shy young novelist stood behind the Marchioness’s chair, admiring the famous curve of her upper arm. They were all delighted to see Ashlyme. What a stranger he was!

  “Has the plague lifted, then?” he said, staring puzzledly about him. It was the only reason he could think of for a celebration.

  They were amused. Had he never heard of sunshine? He accepted a cup of tea the Marchioness had poured especially for him, but declined to watch the antics of the Barley brothers down on the canal bank. He could not think of them, he explained, as a sideshow.

  “Aren’t you being a little naive, old chap?” said Livio Fognet. He winked at the Marchioness’s novelist.