Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  He eyed her warily. He could not tell if she was teasing him. All day her mood had been changeable, demanding.

  “Paint me!” she ordered suddenly. “I don’t know how you can bear to waste this light!”

  It was a long, strange afternoon.

  The too-large collar of Audsley King’s fur coat conspired with the bleached light to diminish and soften the mannishness of her features until she looked, as she stared into the fire, like a child staring out of a familiar window. Ashlyme, encouraged, worked steadily; she had never been so complaisant a model. Meanwhile Fat Mam Etteilla came and went, communicating a monolithic calm as she burned the household rubbish. Into the fire went old picture frames, Audsley King’s bloodied handkerchiefs, a chair with one leg missing, a cardboard box which when it burst slowly open revealed a compressed mass of papers tied with old ribbon. She watched them all reduce to ashes, her agreeable face reddened by the heat, patches of sweat appearing under her arms. She was like a great patient horse, gazing with drooping underlip across an empty field.

  (Ashlyme studied her covertly. Had she seen the Grand Cairo since that curious meeting in Montrouge? He was not sure. Her thoughts were invisible.)

  Later, old women came to sit out on their balconies, looking up at the sky like animals about to be drowned. Fat Mam Etteilla fetched down her cards, laid them out on an old baize-covered table, and predicted, “A good marriage, a bad end.” The workmen next door brought down a wall, more by accident than design, and the old women, chuckling appreciatively, watched the dust belly up into the air. The light shifted secretively a degree at a time, until it had left Ashlyme’s work behind. Audsley King, anyway, had evaded him again: the heat of the fire had relaxed her narrow, angular face and softened the lines about her mouth. He was reluctant to ask her to change her pose, for the comfortable crackling of the fire had induced in him a hypnotic sense of time suspended, time retrieved: so he began a new charcoal study instead. After he had been scratching away at this for a few minutes, Audsley King said, “Before I came to the city I cut off my hair. It was the first of many fatally symbolic gestures.”

  She contemplated this statement as if trying to judge its completeness, while Ashlyme, intrigued, looked at her sidelong and carefully said nothing.

  “It was the autumn before I married,” she went on. “The servants brought out all the rubbish which had accumulated in the house during the past year and burned it in the garden, just as we are doing here. Our parents looked on, while the children ran about cheering, or stared gravely into the red heart of the flames. We loved those autumn fires!”

  She shook her head.

  “How can I explain myself? I cut off my hair and threw it on the fire. Was it despair or intoxication? I was going to the city to begin a new life. I was going to be married. From now on I would paint what I saw, see everything I wished to see. Viriconium! How much it meant to me then!”

  She laughed. She shrugged.

  “I know what you are going to say. And yet . . .

  “We were all going to be famous then—Ignace Retz the wood-block illustrator, elbowing his way down the Rue Montdampierre in his shabby black coat at lunchtime, Osgerby Practal, with nothing then to his name but his sudden drugged stupors and his craving for ‘all human experience’; even Paulinus Rack. Oh, you may laugh, Ashlyme, but we took Paulinus Rack quite seriously then, going about his business in a donkey cart, with that sulphurous yellow cockatoo perched on his shoulder! He was thinner. He hadn’t yet turned a whole generation of painters into tepid water-colourists and doomed consumptive aesthetes on behalf of the High City art collectors.”

  She made a sad defensive gesture.

  “Once when I was ill he brought me a black kitten.” She smiled. “Once,” she said, “he tried to kill himself on the banks of the Pleasure Canal. He pressed a scarf soaked in aether to his face until his legs gave way, but was pulled out of the water before he could drown. We all rather admired him for that.

  “Later I understood the pointlessness of this dream, and of the people who pursued it through the smoke in the Bistro Californium, the Antwerp Estaminet. Oh, we were all going to be famous then—Kristodulos, Astrid Gerstl, ‘La Divinette.’ ” But my husband contracted a howling syphilis and hanged himself one stifling afternoon in the back parlour of a herbalist’s shop. He was twenty-three years old and had saved no money.

  “I was too proud to go back to my mother. I was too determined. Your hair was not your own to cut, she had written to me. It was mine. I had cared for it since you were born. What right had you to betray such a trust? We spoke again only once before she died.”

  Finally she said:

  “I regret none of this. Do you understand?” and was silent again. She closed her eyes. “Will somebody build up the fire? I am cold.”

  For a long time nothing happened in the garden. Afternoon crept toward evening; the fire burned down; the fortune-teller somnolently addressed her cards. Ashlyme sketched the strange long hands of Audsley King. (Later he was to use them as the basis of the equivocal sequence “Studies of some of my friends,” fifty small oils on wood which bemuse us by their repetition of a single image differentiated only by minute changes in the background light.) Occasionally he glanced at her face. Her eyes were half closed, mimicking the exhausted trance of the invalid, while from beneath the grey papery lids she judged his reaction to her little biographical fable. He had decided to hold his tongue. He would take the story away with him and hope its meaning eventually became clear.

  “One July,” she said suddenly, “storms came up from Radiopolis nine days in succession, and always at the same time in the evening. We sat in the summer house, my sisters and I, watching the damp soak into the coloured wood which formed the dome of the roof.” She spoke quickly and fractiously, as if she had pulled this memory across like a screen to hide something else. “In drier weather we—”

  She broke off distractedly.

  “My life is like a letter torn up twenty years ago,” she said in a low, anguished voice. “I have thought about it so often that the original sense is lost.”

  The unfinished portrait attracted her attention. She got unsteadily to her feet and stumbled through the edges of the fire, the hem of her coat scattering charcoal and ashes. She took the canvas off the easel and stared intently at it. “Who’s this?” she demanded. “What a travesty!” She laughed loudly and threw it in the fire. It lay there inertly in the middle of the flames, then, with a sudden dull whooshing sound, flared up white and orange. “Who is it, Ashlyme?” She whirled round and struck out at him; groaned with vertigo; fell against him, hot and fragile as a bird. He grasped her wrists. “None of it will work now,” she whispered. “How could you let me die here, Ashlyme?”

  This was so unfair he could think of nothing to say. He blinked helplessly at the burning portrait.

  Fat Mam Etteilla, accustomed to these brief and febrile rebellions, had got patiently to her feet: now she spread her great capable arms in an elephantine gesture of comfort and tried to sweep Audsley King up in them. Audsley King, choking and weeping, avoided her with a fish-like twist. “Go back to your damned gutter!” she said. She caught sight of the tarot pack, spread out on the fortune-teller’s table. “These cards will never save me now. They smell of candles. They smell of old lust.” She consigned them in handfuls to the flames, where they fluttered, blackened, and finally blazed like caged linnets in a house fire in the Rue Montdampierre.

  “Where is the intercession you promised?” wept Audsley King. “Where is the remission you foresaw?” And she darted away across the garden to crouch coughing desperately at the base of the wall.

  Four or five of the cards, though charred at the edges, had escaped worse damage. Without quite knowing why, Ashlyme pulled them out of the fire and gave them back to the fortune-teller. He watched himself doing this, rather surprised—licking his fingers, steeling himself briefly, plunging his hand into the fire before he could think about it further—and regr
etted the gesture almost immediately. Fat Mam Etteilla received the cards as her due, tucked them away without comment like a handkerchief in the sleeve of her grubby cotton dress. And as soon as he saw that he had burned himself, Ashlyme felt ill and resentful. Audsley King’s behaviour had caused him to act without thinking. He marched over to her.

  “It was not fair to burn the portrait,” he said, “or the cards. We cannot make you immortal.”

  She stared up at him until she had forced him to look away.

  “You are only playing at this!” he shouted. “I thought you had rejected the poses of the High City.” He walked off angrily, waving his arms. “You must make up your mind what you really want, if you want me to help you at all.”

  She coughed painfully.

  “I am already dead as far as the High City is concerned,” she called after him. “Why should they have even a portrait of me? They are all up there, waiting to bid for it, just like vultures!”

  He forced himself to ignore this, although he knew it was probably true. He got hold of a stick and poked about with it in the fire, trying to make out which of the tarry flakes of ash had been his canvas, which the unfortunate Fat Mam’s cards. Slowly his anger wore off and he stopped trembling. He blew on his smarting fingertips. When he was able to turn round again, he found the fortune-teller standing patiently behind him, supporting Audsley King in her arms like a tired child. She was too weak to cause them any further trouble. Silently they carried her inside. When Ashlyme looked down from the first landing, the fire had gone out and the corners of the garden had filled up with shadows. A small wind licked the embers, so that they blazed up briefly the colour of senna flowers, silhouetting his easel as it stood there like a small bony animal tethered and waiting for its owner.

  Halfway up the stairs, a thin line of blood ran out of the corner of Audsley King’s mouth. Her eyes widened; brightened; dulled. “I have such bad dreams about fish,” she said drowsily. “Can’t we go up another way?”

  What was Ashlyme to do?

  Audsley King has changed her mind, he wrote optimistically in a note to his friend Buffo, though in fact he was far from sure that she had. “I shall come and see you immediately.

  Unsure of his reception—after all, he had not only abandoned the astronomer during the débâcle in the Rue Serpolet, he had ignored him thereafter—he waited nervously for a reply. None came.

  We must make new plans, he had written. And yet when it came to planning he found his brain full of contradictory considerations, or else as empty as a new canvas. Audsley King must have somewhere to live, for instance,if she is coming up here. She must have money. However distasteful it was to him, he should, he knew, go and see Paulinus Rack, with whom he could perhaps arrange such things. But the longer it took Buffo to reply to his note the less faith he had in Audsley King’s change of mind—and the longer he stayed in his studio, biting his pen, listening to the rain dripping in the attic, trying to conjure up in his mind’s eye a picture of the thin, intense provincial girl who had arrived in Viriconium twenty years ago to shock the artistic establishment of the day with the suppressed violence and frozen sexual somnambulism of her self-portraits.

  During this period he saw very little of the Grand Cairo.

  Messages more or less urgent still arrived at the studio, usually at night, and in them were named meeting places more or less remote. But the dwarf rarely turned up now at early evening by the Haunted Gate, or deep in the overgrown shadows of the cisPontine Quarter, where only owls now lived; so Ashlyme began to feel that he could ignore them safely. He did go to Montrouge one night—he was returning through the Haadenbosk from a dinner given by the Marchioness “L” for Mme. Chevigne, Vera Ghillera, and the cast of The Little Humpbacked Horse—hoping perhaps to rekindle the dwarf’s enthusiasm for Audsley King. But there were no lights behind the half-completed terra-cotta façades of the civic building programme. And when he reached the tower it was dark and preoccupied.

  Two or three cats ran out of a trench dug across the newly surfaced road at my feet, he wrote in his journal. Their eyes were green and blank. Has the dwarf already left Viriconium? Or was he crouched up there in the darkness among his rusty knives and hair totems, trying to keep track of his plots against the Barley brothers?

  He had something of an answer to this a few days later in the plague zone.

  On a visit to the Rue Serpolet he was forced out of his way by the attentions of the beggars in the Plaza of Unrealised Time. He found himself on the seeping periphery of Cheminor, that suburb of flaking brick walls where the streets are lined with graveyards, old churches, and boarding-houses. At night the lamps there give off an orange glare which muddles the sense of perspective and gives the blank faces of the people a suffering look. They seem to float towards you in their cheap sober clothes, then away from you again like ghosts. It is often called “the Undertakers’ Quarter.” Ashlyme, unencumbered by his easel for once, was making his way down an alley which opened onto the main thoroughfare of Endingall Street, when he heard the sound of running footsteps.

  He popped his head out of the mouth of the alley. Up and down Endingall Street the orange lamps stretched dully away. He had the impression of a crowd of people coming quickly towards him. He withdrew his head and waited.

  A moment later a small agitated figure ran past. It was the Grand Cairo. He had a leather cosh in one hand, and in the other something that looked like a long kitchen knife. He passed the mouth of the alley in a flash, the skirts of his black coat slapping his knees and his steel-toe-capped boots thudding urgently as he propelled himself down the middle of the road with his head thrown back and his breath hissing between his bared teeth. There were extensive stains on his hands, made blackish by the orange light, and on the blade of his knife. His eyes were white and staring with effort. He risked a glance over his shoulder, groaned, and ran on, looking neither right nor left.

  Close on his heels came a score of his own policemen, waving their arms and tugging back on the leads of their enormous dogs.

  It was over in an instant: one moment Endingall Street was full of the pursuit, carried on in grim silence but for the pounding of feet, the hoarse panting and choking of the dogs; the next there was only a fading whiff of Altaean Balm to suggest that the dwarf had even been there. Had he killed someone again? Why else would he be chased by his own men? Ashlyme blinked into the orange glare. Endingall Street was bounded by a high wall, purpled with soot. Over the top of it he suddenly caught sight of an ornamental obelisk, bearing the figure of a stone bird poised for flight. It was a cemetery. Had they chased the dwarf into it? For a moment Ashlyme debated going to see. Then he walked quickly off in the direction of the Artists’ Quarter. By the time he found himself on familiar ground, the whole event had taken on the distant, unreal air of a scene in an old play, and he had almost convinced himself it was not the Grand Cairo he had seen, but some other very small man.

  Later that evening he met Fat Mam Etteilla hurrying away from the Rue Serpolet in the direction of the High City. A fine rain had beaded her bare arms and greying hair; it gave her cheeks the same varnished appearance as the fruit on her hat. She clutched in her reddened hands the handles of an assortment of shopping bags which bulged with old clothes. She seemed withdrawn and thoughtful, heavy with determination. He walked along with her silently for a few minutes, glancing up every so often at her monumental body towering above him, and admiring what he had earlier described as her “implacable simplicity.”

  “How is Audsley King?” he asked. “I’m off to see her now. I expect you’ll be back there soon?” When she didn’t answer he went on anxiously, “Do you think she should be left alone at this time of night?”

  The fortune-teller shrugged.

  “I can’t help her,” she said, staring darkly off into the rain, “if she won’t help herself. She has no faith in me or in the cards.” She made a peculiar, puzzled, hopeless gesture, lifting the shopping bags for Ashlyme to see. “She to
ld me to pack my things,” she said. “That’s what she’s just done.” She wiped the rain off her face with a sudden angry motion. Her eyes were hard and hurt.

  “She’s like a child,” protested Ashlyme. “She doesn’t mean it.”

  Fat Mam Etteilla sniffed. “I’ve packed my things, as I was told to,” she said stubbornly. “You have to go where the faith is.” She shook her head. “I could have helped her,” she said. “She begged me to, as you well know.” She walked away from Ashlyme, quickly and angrily, leaving him behind as if he reminded her too much of Audsley King. “Begged me to,” she repeated, with a sort of massive dignity. “But I can’t do any more if she doesn’t respect my cards.”

  Ashlyme didn’t know what to say. He struggled to keep up with her, but in her anger and hurt pride she quickly left him behind. He stood on the wet pavement feeling isolated and abandoned. “I thought I saw the Grand Cairo an hour ago,” he shouted suddenly. “He seemed to be in a hurry.” If he had hoped to surprise her he was mistaken. She walked on like a tired horse, her broad back moving steadily away towards the Plaza of Unrealised Time. Eventually she looked back at him and nodded. “I knew it was you who came dressed as a fish,” she said. “Oh, you could have helped her once, I give you your due for that. But you should have got her out of there while you still had the courage of your convictions.” Then she was gone.

  He was in the Rue Serpolet for an hour and a half, whistling and calling up at the lighted window of Audsley King’s studio. A shadow moved back and forth in front of the shadow of an easel, but she would not let him in, and all he could hear was her harsh, mannish sobbing. The air was full of withered chestnut leaves, which touched his face like wet hands.