Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  “After all,” chided the Marchioness, “we must think of them as something!” She laughed shrilly and then seemed to lose her confidence. “Mustn’t we?”

  A bemused silence followed. After a minute her novelist said, “I don’t think Rack himself could have put it better.” He blushed. He was saved by a general movement toward the railings. A murmur of laughter went up and down the terrace. “Oh, do look, Paulinus!” cried the Marchioness. “One of them has fallen in, right up to the knees!”

  Rack gave her a mechanical glance and a twist of his fat lips. He shrugged. “My dear Marchioness,” he said, and moved his chair closer to Ashlyme’s. He could create a small eddy of intimacy in any crowd. We, he was able to suggest, with a touch of one plump hand, have nothing in common with these people. Why are we here at all? Only because they need us. It was a flattering device, and he owed to it much of his social and financial success. “Fognet’s a buffoon, I’m afraid,” he murmured, leaning forward a little. “And the Marchioness a parasite. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”

  “But I love the Marchioness,” said Ashlyme loudly. “Don’t you?”

  Rack looked at him uncertainly. “You surprise me.” He laughed. He raised his voice. “By the way,” he said, “how is Audsley King?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the Marchioness plaintively. “We are all appalled by her situation.”

  The Barley brothers, egged on by the laughter from above, linked arms and jumped into the canal together, showering the tables along the terrace with bright drops of spray. They had found a spot where the water was deeper. It surged and bubbled; then their great red faces appeared, puffing and blowing, above its greenish surface. “Gor!” they said. “It i’n’ ’alf cold!” They coughed and spat, they shook their heads about and stuck their fingers in their ears to get the water out. The little screams of the women encouraged them to thrash about (it could hardly be called swimming); to blow bubbles; and to push one another under. Presently they dragged themselves out, water gushing out of their trouser legs and running down the towpath. They grinned stupidly upward, too exhausted now to go back in for their shoes.

  Ashlyme was enraged by this display.

  “Audsley King is coughing her left lung up, Marchioness,” he said bitterly. “She is dying, if you want to know. What will you do about that?” He laughed. “I do not see you abroad much in the plague zone!”

  The Marchioness blinked into her teacup. It seemed for a moment she would not answer. Finally she said: “You judge people by unrealistic standards, Master Ashlyme. That is why your portraits are so cruel.” She looked thoughtfully at the tea leaves, then got to her feet and took the arm of her novelist. “Though I daresay we are as stupid as you make us appear.” She adjusted her dove-grey gloves. “I hope you’ll tell Audsley King that we are still her friends,” she said. And she went away between the surrounding tables, exchanging a word here and there with people that she knew. Once or twice the young novelist looked angrily back at Ashlyme, but she touched his shoulder in a placatory way and soon they were lost to view.

  Paulinus Rack bit his lip. “Damn!” he said. “I shall have to pay for that later.” He stared across the canal. “You’ll find you’ve carried this attitude too far one day, Ashlyme.”

  “What are you going to do when the plague reaches the High City, Rack?” asked Ashlyme with some contempt.

  Rack ignored him. “Your work may be less fashionable in future. If I were you I would be prepared for that. Never insult the paying customers.” He made a dismissive gesture. “You cannot save Audsley King anyway,” he said.

  Ashlyme was furious. He grabbed at Rack’s arm. Rack looked frightened and pulled it away. Ashlyme caught him by the fingers instead. He twisted them. “What do you know?” he jeered. “I’ll have her out of there within the week.” Rack only curled his lip. He made no attempt to free his fingers, so Ashlyme, horrified to have committed himself to the rescue attempt in public, twisted them harder. “What do you say to that?” He wanted to see Rack wince, or hear him apologise, but nothing like that happened. They sat there for some time, looking at one another defiantly. Rack must have been in considerable pain. Livio Fognet, who did not seem to understand the situation, winked and grinned impartially at them. It came on to rain. The High City opened its umbrella and took itself off to Mynned, while the Barley brothers put their arms over their heads to protect themselves from the rain and, groaning, watched their shoes float away towards Alves. Ashlyme let Rack’s fingers go. “Within the week,” he repeated.

  “I’ll just go and have a word with Angina Desformes,” said Livio Fognet.

  “There is a certain time of the afternoon,” said Audsley King, “when everything seems repellent to me.”

  The city was unseasonably dank again, the air chilly and lifeless. Tarot cards were scattered across the floor of the studio as if someone had flung them there in a fit of rage. Audsley King lay in a nest of brocade pillows on the faded sofa, her thin body propped up on one elbow. On the easel in front of her she had a grotesque little charcoal sketch, in which a conductor, beating time with extravagant sweeps of his baton, cut off the heads of the poppies which made up his orchestra. It was full of overt violence, quite unlike her usual work. It was unfinished, and she regarded it with flushed features and angry, frustrated gestures. In her preoccupation she had let the studio fire burn down, but she did not seem to feel the cold. This wasn’t a good sign.

  Ashlyme stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. He felt shy, guilty, inadequate: not so much in the knowledge of the betrayal he had come to effect, as in his inability thereby to make any real change in her circumstances. He had never before been so aware of the bareness of the grey floorboards, the impermanent air of the canvases piled in the corners, the age and condition of the furniture. He opened his mouth to say, “In the High City they would take more care of you,” but thought better of it. Instead he studied the two new paintings that hung unframed on the wall. Both were of Fat Mam Etteilla, and showed her crouching on the floor shuffling the cards. Under one of them the artist had written in a slanting hand, the door into the open! They were hurried and careless, like the cartoon on the easel, as if she had lost faith in her technique—or her patience with the very medium.

  “You shouldn’t work so hard,” he said.

  She was amused.

  “Work? This is nothing.” She dabbed at the sketch, looked disgustedly at the resulting line, and smeared it with her long thumb. “When I lived in the farmlands,” she said, “I would paint from six in the morning until it grew dark.”

  She laughed.

  “ ‘Six in the morning, and chrome yellow is back in nature!’ Do you know that quotation? My eyes never grew tired. The ploughed fields stretched away like a dark dream, covered in mist. Rooks creaked above it, circling the elms. My husband—”

  She stopped. Her mouth curved in regret, and then in self-contempt.

  “What a masterpiece this is!”

  She struck the canvas so hard that her charcoal broke. The casel tottered, folded itself up, and fell over with a clatter.

  “That field of poppies is the field we have sown!” she cried, looking vaguely into the air in front of her. “It is like an orchestra in which the players take no notice of their conductor. Am I raving?”

  Suddenly she collapsed among the pillows and blood poured out of her mouth. It ran along her arm and began to soak into the brocade. She stared helplessly down at herself.

  “My husband was an artist too. He was far better than I am. Shall I show you?” She tried to get up, slumped back, dabbed at herself with a handkerchief. “Nothing of his is left, of course.” Her eyes focused on Ashlyme. Tears ran out of them. “No, I am quite all right, thank you.”

  Ashlyme was dismayed. She had never been married. (Before moving to the city she had lived, as far as he knew, with her parents. This had been several years ago, and no paintings survived from the period.) The haemorrhage had brought to the surfa
ce in this inexplicable delusion some deeply buried internal drama. She clutched his wrist and pulled him closer to her. Embarrassed, he stared into the thin face, white as a gardenia, with its harshly cut features and strange voracious lines about the mouth. She whispered something more, but in the middle of the sentence fell asleep. After a moment he detached himself gently from her grip, and, walking like a man in a dream, went out into the passage.

  “Come on, Buffo,” he said.

  It had been their intention to dose Audsley King with laudanum, although neither of them, frankly, had been clear how this might be done. She ate so little. They had discussed putting it in a glass of wine. “But how to make sure she drinks it?” The drug now seemed unnecessary, but Buffo was an inflexible conspirator and insisted she have it anyway. In the event he did not give her enough: as the stuff touched her tongue she moaned and moved her head with the practised obstinacy of the invalid (who fears that every surrender to sleep might be the last), so that most of the dose trickled down her cheek. The little she swallowed, though, had an eerie effect. After a moment she sat bolt upright, and with her eyes firmly closed said clearly:

  “Les morts, les pauvre mortes, ont de grand doleurs. Michael?”

  Buffo gave a tremendous guilty leap and spilled the remainder of the draught on the floor.

  “What?” he shouted. “Are we discovered already?”

  Ashlyme, who could see that the woman was only talking in her sleep, tried to pull him away from her. He resisted stubbornly, plucking at Ashlyme’s clothes and hair.

  “The noise!” appealed Ashlyme in an urgent whisper. “Do you want to wake her, you madman?”

  They tottered about on the bare boards in the failing light, panting, hissing, pushing at one another, while the thick smell of the drug rose up all around them.

  “She has not taken it!”

  “Nevertheless!”

  Audsley King groaned suddenly, as if seeking their attention, and subsided into the pillows. They stopped struggling and watched her warily. Her mouth fell open. She began to snore.

  To Ashlyme’s surprise the Grand Cairo had agreed to wait below in the Rue Serpolet with the handcart. Their plan was to carry her down to him in an old linen sheet of Buffo’s. Meanwhile he would make sure that no one got into the house. Ashlyme was worried nevertheless. Audsley King’s limbs were lax and uncooperative, and she was heavier than her wasted appearance had led him to expect. “Hurry! If he gets impatient he will come up here and interfere!” A fierce heat seemed to radiate from her skin. Upside down, her face, with its bluish hollows and trickle of dried blood, looked accusatory, ironical, amused. They muddled it and could not get her off the sofa and onto the sheet. Ashlyme would not continue. “We’ve killed her!” he said. The whole idea was mad. He would have nothing more to do with it. “At any moment that creature will be up here with his knives and knuckle-dusters!”

  In the end Buffo had to lift her onto the sheet on his own, while Ashlyme stood by with a blunted upholstery needle, ready to sew her in with long, loose stitches.

  “Now the disguises. Be quick!”

  Buffo took his clothes off in a corner. As he hopped from one foot to the other on the cold floor, trying to conceal himself, a strong smell of camphor wafted from him. Ashlyme, embarrassed by his friend’s modesty, turned over the scattered tarot cards or glanced through the window at the yellowish underbelly of the clouds above the Rue Serpolet. He began to believe that the scheme might succeed after all. He would offer Audsley King space in his own studio while she reorganised her life. He would get her away from Rack and the Marchioness “L.” There would be other patrons, other dealers, only too willing to take her on. He tapped his fingers on the windowsill. “Hurry,” he urged Buffo. “Even now the Fat Mam may be returning.”

  Buffo, swaddled at last in his disagreeable bandages, pulled the rubber mask over his head and turned to face into the room.

  He asked, “Is it on straight?” which Ashlyme heard as a sepulchral and threatening “Iv id om fdrade?” Yellow light, reflected from the clouds outside, splashed down one side of the mask. It looked like a horse’s head, newly scraped to the bone in a knacker’s yard and decked with green paper ribbons for some festival. But its horns and eyes belonged to nothing on earth. The astronomer patted it with one cupped hand like a woman adjusting a hat and came towards Ashlyme, who shuddered and backed away, saying,

  “Must I wear such an awful thing?”

  Buffo laughed. “Yours isn’t half so striking. Here!”

  Ashlyme accepted it with distaste. It was damp and sweaty. He forced it quickly down over his face, so as not to give himself time to think, and was at once unable to breathe. Nauseated by its smell, his nose squashed over to one side, his left eye covered, he struggled to tear it off, found the astronomer’s hands forcing it back on. “I need no help! Leave me alone!” He was disgusted with himself as much as with Buffo. This foetid confinement, more than anything else, made the plan unbearable. His eyes were streaming. When he could see again he glared resentfully at Buffo’s swathed, stick-like limbs.

  “I won’t be bandaged up like that, whatever you say!”

  Buffo shrugged.

  “Suit yourself, then.”

  The lower stairs of the house were bathed in a dim yellow light and strewn with the lath and plaster dislodged daily by the landlord’s workmen. Abandoned building materials lay about on each landing. Ashlyme and the astronomer picked their way down through this litter, Audsley King slung between them like a stolen carpet. (While behind their doors the other occupants of the house ignored the furtive thudding on the stairs and spoke in the desultory, argumentative tones of the plague zone, asking one another if it meant to rain, and what they would get from the butcher tomorrow.)

  Audsley King shook her head restively and groaned. “I cannot have those great lilies in here,” she said in a low, reasonable voice. “You know how hard it is to get my breath.” She trembled once or twice and was still.

  Ashlyme and Buffo redoubled their efforts. She seemed to have grown heavier with every step, numbing their arms and slipping out of their aching fingers. They weren’t used to the work and bickered over it like two old men: if Buffo was not pulling forward too hard, then Ashlyme was hanging back. Neither dared raise his voice to the other, but, trammeled in his rancid helmet, could only curse the thick hiss of his own breath in his ears and wish himself back in the High City. Their feet scraped and slithered on the stairs.

  “Don’t pull!”

  “If only you would stop pushing like that!”

  Without warning, Audsley King—dreaming perhaps—drew her knees up to her chin, and the sheet contracted like a ghostly chrysalis in the gloom. Ashlyme lost his grip on her shoulders. She slipped forward, knocked Buffo off his feet, and tumbled down the stairs after him, bumping and groaning on every step, to fetch up with a hollow thud among the bags of sand and lime on a landing not far below.

  “Buffo!” begged Ashlyme. “Be more careful!”

  Buffo stared at him with hatred, his absurd barrel chest heaving beneath its rags. The sheet writhed briefly; snores came from it. They approached it cautiously.

  “Where am I?” said Audsley King.

  She had regained consciousness, and obviously believed herself to be alone.

  “Am I in Hell? Oh, nothing will ever console me for the ghastliness of this condition!”

  It was the voice of someone who wakes in a bare room in an unknown city; stares dully at the washstand and the disordered bed; and having pulled open every empty drawer turns at last to the window and the empty streets below, only to discover she has lived here all her life.

  “Another haemorrhage. If only I could die.”

  She considered this, then forgot it.

  “My father said, ‘Why draw this filth?’ ” she went on. “ ‘If you abuse your talents you will lose them. They will be taken from you if you draw filth.’ It’s so dark in here. I didn’t want to go to bed so soon.”

&n
bsp; There was a small sob. She struggled a little, as if to test the limits of her confinement.

  She stiffened.

  A piercing shriek issued from the sheet.

  Ashlyme tried to get hold of her feet but she tore herself out of his grasp and began to roll back and forth across the landing, knocking into the walls and shouting, “I am not dead! I am not dead!”

  At this, doors flew open up and down the stairs and out came her neighbours to complain about the noise. A few ducked back when they saw what was happening, but several of them, mainly women, exchanged ironical if puzzled nods and settled down to watch. Emmet Buffo, who had rehearsed such an eventuality, explained to anyone who would listen: “Official business. Quarantine police. Keep back!” This was so manifestly ridiculous that he was ignored (although in the mêlée that was to develop later it did him more harm than good).

  Audsley King, meanwhile, had ripped the sheet open along Ashlyme’s rough seam and thrust one of her long powerful hands through the gap to clutch desperately at the air. By now she was so frightened that she had started to cough again, in a series of deep, destructive spasms between which she could only retch and gasp. A red bloom appeared at the upper end of the sheet and spread rapidly. Ashlyme lifted her into a sitting position. “Please be calm,” he begged. The convulsion decreased a little. He was ready to confess the whole sordid business to her, but he did not know where to begin. Gently he freed her head and arms from the sheet. The women crowded forward, silent, uncertain, no longer amused; they groaned angrily at the sight of her white cheeks and bloody lips. She blinked up at them. Her hands were hot; she took one of Ashlyme’s between them.

  “I beg of you, whoever you are, to get me out of this shroud,” she said.

  Suddenly she caught sight of the thing over his head. She began to scream again, flailing her arms and begging him not to hurt her.

  This was too much for the women, who advanced on Ashlyme, jeering and rolling up their sleeves. Emmet Buffo stepped in front of them, making gestures he imagined to be placatory. He took several nasty knocks about the head and chest, and was pushed into a pile of sand, where he lay jerking his long legs ineffectually and repeating, “Official police, official police.”