Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  Audsley King thrust Ashlyme away. “Fish into man: man into fish!” she cried, in a thick Soubridge accent—remembering perhaps some solstitial bonfire, some girlhood ritual in the heavy ploughland. “Murderer!”

  Ashlyme fell back, astonished.

  A fish?

  He touched the mask with his fingers. It was the head of a trout, to which someone had added thick rubbery lips and a ludicrous crest of spines. He clapped his hands to his head and, reeling about in disgust, tried vainly to pull the mask off. Its smell grew horrifying. Why had he conspired to make himself so absurd? He could think only of escaping. Audsley King would have to be abandoned. In the High City he would be a laughingstock. He threw himself at the women, who were punching and kicking Buffo with a kind of dazed, preoccupied savagery, and tried to drag the astronomer away from them.

  “Bitten off more than you can chew, eh?” they sneered. “Let’s have them headpieces off and see who you really are!”

  Having won the day, though, they made no attempt to carry out this threat. One of them attended to Audsley King, while the rest stood arms akimbo, sniffing defiantly, or tugged nervous fingers through their ruffled hair.

  So it would have remained but for the arrival of the Grand Cairo, who had grown bored with his post at the handcart. He ran lightly up the stairs from the street and approached the women with a brisk tread, as if he was used to taking command of any situation. He was wearing a suit of military-looking brown leather, into the belt of which he had stuck a curious weapon—a knife about a foot long, with a round, varnished wooden handle like an awl’s, and a blade nowhere thicker than a knitting needle. From a strap on his wrist dangled a workman-like rubber cosh. His feet were shod in laced boots with steel toecaps. He was well aware of the effect his appearance made. With his hands clasped behind his back and his chest thrown out, he gave the women a long intent look.

  “What’s this?” he asked. “Are we having some trouble with these people?”

  “No,” said Ashlyme. “It’s all right.”

  Hearing this, the women laughed sarcastically. They returned the dwarf’s scrutiny with bold, interested glances.

  Meanwhile Emmet Buffo sat helplessly in a corner, breathing in exhausted gasps, while one of the women bent over him trying to pull off his mask. “Stop that,” ordered the dwarf. He swaggered over to her and prodded her buttocks with his truncheon. Her face reddened. “Why, you dirty little bugger,” she said, half-amused. She ruffled his hair, wrinkling her nose at the smell of Altaean Balm; then, quick as lightning, knocked him over with a jerk of her elbow. She watched him rolling about on the floor clutching his eye and said, “You’ll not do that again in a hurry, will you, my dear?”

  “Obscene bitch!” shouted the Grand Cairo.

  He sprang to his feet with the unpredictable violence of the acrobat (who moves from rest to motion without any apparent intervening state), dragging the long knife from his belt. Before anyone could stop him he had grabbed her by the hair, pulled her down into a kneeling position, and rammed the knife twice into her open mouth as hard as he could. Her eyes bulged briefly. “That’s that, then,” he said. Ashlyme fell down and vomited into the fish’s-head mask; around him he could hear the rest of the women screaming in panic. Emmet Buffo sat where he was, whispering, “Official police.” The dwarf danced about the landing, stabbing at any women who came within reach, until he drove the knife three inches into a doorpost and broke it off. He swung his cosh on its leather thong.

  “No more!” shouted Ashlyme. “Why are you doing this?”

  Weeping with fear and revulsion, he ran down the stairs and into the street, where rain had begun to pour from the undersides of the clouds, spattering the dusty chestnut trees and making a greasy cement out of the plaster dust and fallen leaves on the pavements. Buffo staggered out after him, confused and bleeding, his rags coming unwrapped and his dreadful headdress knocked askew. Seeing that they were not pursued, they leaned against the handcart. “Those wretched women,” panted the astronomer. “They will always ruin your plans.”

  Ashlyme stared at him speechlessly for a moment, then walked off.

  The rain fell.

  Buffo called, “What about the handcart? Ashlyme?”

  The screams and shouts which continued to come from the house soon drew the attention of the plague police. Buffo saw them in the distance. He gave a start of surprise, grabbed the handles of the cart, and ran erratically down the Rue Serpolet with it until one of its wheels came off. It mounted the kerb and fell onto its side. Buffo looked round in panic, as if he had lost his bearings, then made off with long strides into the gathering darkness between two buildings, calling, “Ashlyme? Ashlyme?”

  The plague police went up into the house, two at a time. Shortly afterwards there was silence. Fat Mam Etteilla the fortune-teller then trudged into sight from the direction of the market. The rain had plastered her yellow cotton dress to her billowing breasts and hams. Her eyes were phlegmatic, her arms full of greengrocery. She entered the house. A great wail went up as she discovered Audsley King on the stairs. Doors were banged, the lights came on in Audsley King’s studio, there was a great deal of coming and going between floors.

  Ashlyme, who had been hiding from Buffo in a wet doorway, waited until the commotion had died down and then went home, soaked.

  Later, he stared into the mirror above his washstand, hardly seeing the lugubrious, blubbery-lipped totem that stared back out at him, its eyes popping solemnly and its loose scales dropping into the sink. All the way back he had dreaded trying to remove it, but it came off quite easily in the end.

  THE THIRD CARD

  THE CITY

  You will mix with important people without artistic appreciation. Their tastes differ widely from yours. Beware “the Small Man” coming after this card.

  “Angels, it is said, often do not know whether they walk among the living or the dead.”

  RAINER MARIA RILKE, Elegies

  The period that followed was quiet and nerve-racking. He woke guiltily from every sleep. In the middle of stretching a canvas or doing his house-work he would recall some incident of the débâcle and be overwhelmed by a wave of revulsion and shame. He could not turn his clients away when they came to pose, yet dreaded every knock on the door in case it was the quarantine police or—worse still—some message full of contempt from Audsley King, delivered by the avenging fortune-teller. But no summons came from either quarter.

  I hear nothing from Emmet Buffo, he wrote in his diary. And went on, perhaps unfairly, Why should I seek him out? The whole farrago was his fault. He reminded himself in the same breath, I must avoid Rack and his clique. How can I face them now, with their sneers and insinuations?

  In fact he had no difficulty. Ironically enough his encounter with them on the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves had only served to increase his standing in the High City. Rumours of the failed rescue attempt—which, when they filtered up to Mynned from the exiles in the Bistro Californium and the Luitpold Café, were mercifully vague—merely added to his new romantic stature. He was popular in the salons. The Marchioness “L” called on him, with a new novelist. He was forced for the first time in his career to turn away commissions. The two or three portraits he completed at this time tended to be kinder than usual. This embarrassed him, and rather disappointed his clients. For once no one wanted an Ashlyme they could live with. They craved his bad opinion. He was their conscience. Not that he could compete with the plague, or the Barley brothers: and of the latter he was soon writing,

  In the salons we hear nothing but what clothes they wear, what wineshop they frequent this week, how they have got pregnant some silly young brodeuse from the Piazza of Inherited Tendencies. “Will the Barley brothers dine at home tonight?” the women ask each other. “Or will they dine abroad?” They will dine, as everyone knows, like pigs, in some pie shop behind the Margarethestrasse and then fall down insensible in the gutters. “The Barley brothers have invented Egg Foo Yung!”
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br />   When he thought about the Grand Cairo, Ashlyme was filled with a kind of violent disgust which extended to himself. He dreamed about the woman with the gaping mouth and the bulging eyes as if he had been responsible for thrusting the knife into the back of her throat. Nothing like this event had ever happened in his life before; even awake, he could see it over and over again just by closing his eyes. He could also see the dwarf’s expression when he had said, “That’s that, then.” It was one of satisfaction, the ordinary satisfaction of an ordinary need, as if one had just finished breakfast. Ashlyme dreaded another meeting with him if only because the shadow of this expression would lie—as it had always done, but now visible—just under his skin, alongside his vanity or his belief that he understood the language of cats.

  Nevertheless a meeting was unavoidable. Ashlyme stayed away from the tower at Montrouge, but one night after his meal at the Vivien he came back to find the front door of his house banging open in the wind and the dwarf waiting for him in the darkened studio.

  The dwarf looked tired. He complained, as usual, that the Barley brothers were plotting his downfall. “I do not take them seriously yet—things have not gone that far—but soon I must.” He complained of boredom. To alleviate it, he said, he had spent all week with prostitutes in Line Mass. They had called him “my little chancellor” and “my pet cock,” but he had got no enjoyment out of it, only migraines and a dry cough. As he told Ashlyme this he was watching him carefully. He sat on a windowsill, kicking his legs. He picked up Ashlyme’s lay figure and twisted its limbs into uncomfortable, not-quite-human positions. He laughed. “Come on, Ashlyme, what’s the matter? How’s old Emmley Burwash? He always looked the feeble type to me!”

  Ashlyme stared at him across the studio.

  “Well, if you won’t talk, you won’t,” said the dwarf. “I can’t make you.” He poked about among Ashlyme’s things until a rough portrait of Audsley King caught his eye. “What’s happened here?”

  Ashlyme often saved the money he would have spent on a new canvas by reusing an old one. In this case he had done the painting over a group portrait of the Baroness de B—— and her family which had never been collected from the studio. As the wet summer advanced and the new paint began to fade, the image of the Baroness was beginning to reemerge in the form of a very old woman holding a flower, slowly absorbing and distorting the figure of Audsley King. There was something deliberate and eerie about this act of replacement. It was as if the Baroness, prohibited by her own vanity from collecting the original picture, nevertheless intended to claim the canvas. Ashlyme had followed the process with a sort of fascinated horror.

  “It is some failure of the pigments,” he said. “The weather. I don’t know. It wasn’t a very successful portrait anyway.” He cleared his throat; swallowed. “It sometimes happens.”

  Now that he found himself able to speak, he could wait no longer.

  “How did you escape the police?” he heard himself ask anxiously. “What did you tell them? I watched from the Rue Serpolet, but you did not come down again. What happened after I went?”

  The dwarf, who had been waiting for this, winked cruelly.

  “In the Rue Serpolet,” he said, in a parody of an official voice, “I surprised two men in the act of smuggling a poor woman out of the quarantine zone against her will. I attempted to arrest them, but they stunned me, stabbed another unfortunate woman in a particularly horrible manner, and made their escape. I cannot describe them. They were wearing the most grotesque disguises. They were obviously very experienced criminals. Oh, don’t look so wretched, man! Can’t you take a joke?”

  Ashlyme bit his lip.

  “Even so,” he said. “Are you sure they believed you?”

  The dwarf stared at him impatiently.

  “Why shouldn’t they? I am the Grand Cairo. Everything they have, they have from me.” He laughed. “Besides, I am now in charge of this very investigation.” He gave an insolent shrug, tapped the side of his nose. “I have sworn to catch the offenders. A horrible crime like this is a matter of honour to me, you might say.”

  “But the testimony of the other women!”

  “Unfortunately we had to arrest some of the women. They were confused, and had somehow got hold of the idea that I had injured one of their number.”

  He gripped Ashlyme’s arm suddenly.

  “For your own peace of mind,” he said, in a low, urgent voice, “I advise you to forget the whole dangerous business. I intend to, which is good luck for you. And another thing, Ashlyme—” He tightened his grip until tears were forced from Ashlyme’s eyes. “Never leave me in the lurch like that again, or you’ll be the next one to feel that little skewer of mine. Enemies are all around!” Ashlyme tried to pull his arm away. Contemptuously, the dwarf watched his struggles for a moment or two, then let him go. “Remember!” He was silent after that, staring at Ashlyme as if he couldn’t really see him. Then he said in quite a different tone,

  “A curious thing happened to me on my way back from Line Mass this morning. I tell you, Ashlyme, it was one of those incidents that make you think! I was walking along the canal bank in a district full of warehouses. Pink-and-brown-brick walls. The smell of old water. Rusty pulleys swinging in the wind above your head. A very old man approached me and, as we drew level, stopped to look into my face. It was an eerie look he gave me. As I stared back at him the sun came out briefly from behind a cloud. An unbearable halo seemed to flare round the edges of his yellowed skull! For a second or two it was very beautiful, this incandescent light burning round the edges of his head, dissolving away the pink brick behind him so that the whole sky seemed to open up like the white page of a book—

  “But then the wind came up again and the sun went back in, and I saw that his face was eaten away by some disease contracted in youth. His mouth was trembling. He looked sickly and preoccupied. A vague power emanated from him, like a wind pushing me away. Ashlyme, I think the plague will have us all in the end!”

  The dwarf shuddered superstitiously and was silent again. This was a side of his character he had never displayed before. At first Ashlyme suspected he had made the story up, or at least embroidered it to make it more impressive; but when he passed his heavily ringed hands over his face and turned to stare gloomily out of the window, it was quite impossible not to believe that something had genuinely disturbed him in Line Mass. He declined Ashlyme’s offer of tea, with a gesture which hinted that he could not be jollied out of his mood. He was plagued, he admitted, with nervous depressions which came and went with the weather. Undoubtedly this new melancholy was of that sort. Abruptly he said, “As a matter of fact I have thought a great deal about a woman I saw when we were in the Rue Serpolet, a big woman who tells fortunes and is said to live with Audsley King. I daresay you know of a woman like that?”

  Ashlyme nodded puzzledly.

  The dwarf gave him a curious smile, weak-mouthed yet conspiratorial, and drew from inside his studded leather jacket an envelope with a red wax seal as big as a carbuncle. “Just so,” he said. “I want this delivered to her.” He thought for a moment. “Tell her that I am most interested in the cards. Assure her of my regard. Build me up in her eyes. This is a romantic matter, Ashlyme, and I trust you. Take the letter to the Rue Serpolet as soon as you can.”

  Ashlyme was filled with panic.

  “But what about Audsley King?” he appealed. “She may have recognised my voice in the mêlée on that wretched staircase! How can I face her again?”

  The dwarf stared at him expressionlessly, holding out the letter. Ashlyme spent a sleepless night and visited the house in the Rue Serpolet the next day, a dozen lilies waxen and heavy in the crook of his arm.

  “How are you?”

  “As you see me.”

  The room was cold. Audsley King lay on the sofa—thin, still, dazed-looking—wrapped in a fur coat with curiously huge sleeves. She spoke reluctantly of “thieves”; her eyes moved apprehensively every time a builder’s cart went p
ast the house. Bowls of anemones stood on every flat surface, as if she had begun to mourn herself. The flowers were purple and wine red, the colours of her disease; their necks were bent compliantly. She discussed small things: her domestic arrangements (“I am here in the studio all day now”) and her meals. “I have a sudden dislike for fish!” He studied her closely, but she was not laughing at him. “Would you go to the window and look out? We have had thieves break in, and I am very nervous.”

  No, she said, she had done no new work. There, as he could see, was her easel, folded against the wall. She had drawn some cartoons, but she would not show them to him, of all people. They were not good enough. She had kept them for a day only, then torn them up. Why had he not been to see her? She would be glad to sit for him again, if that was what he wanted. Life seemed so quiet. She hadn’t to exert herself. It was not empty, but very quiet. “The fortune-teller is kind, but I miss the High City,” she said. Then again, she had so much to think about, there was barely time in the day!

  He promised to call again soon. As he went out she was already staring uneasily into the corners of the room.

  In the narrow hall with its broken linoleum and stacked canvases, Ashlyme found the Fat Mam bending over a bucket, her great bulk unhappy in a loose, flower-printed dress with little “muttonchop” sleeves. Washing the floor had made her breathe heavily through her open mouth, and there were broad patches of sweat beneath her arms. The hall was lighted only by a fanlight, which opened onto the communal stairs; in the brown gloom this produced she seemed monumental, immovable. But she stood up as he approached, wiping one powerful forearm across her cheek, and made way for him impassively. Steam came up from the bucket. Hardly knowing what to say, he handed her the dwarf’s envelope. She turned it over, examined the florid seal, weighed it a moment in her big rough hands as if she was not certain what to do with it.