Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  He continued to hear nothing from Emmet Buffo. Was the astronomer ignoring him out of pique? Should he go to Alves and see him anyway? He was loth somehow to make the journey. He sent another note instead.

  While he wasted his energy thus, unaware that he had so little time left at his disposal, autumn, like a thin melancholy, settled itself into the plague zone. Down there it was as if the world had become as flimsy as the muslin curtains at an old woman’s window in the Via Gellia: as if the actual essence of the world was too old to care anymore about keeping up appearances. With the first frosts, unknown wasting diseases had swept the Low City; and the quarantine police, unable to deal with the situation, unsure even whether the new phthisias and fevers were contagious, had panicked and begun to seal and burn the houses of the dead. For days the dusty avenues and abandoned alleyways had been full of reluctant fires, flickering at night like blue gas flames, as feeble and debilitated as the zone itself, which now crept quietly over its original boundary at the Pleasure Canal, inundating Lime Walk and the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves and stealing up towards the ponderous great houses, the banks of anemones, the tall pastel towers of the High City. Alves held out on its steep spur, eccentric and insular in a greyish sea.

  As the plague tightened its grip, so the Barley brothers tried harder to become human.

  If indeed they did create the city “from a handful of dust,” Ashlyme told his journal, these brothers seem to have done so only in order to vandalise it. They contribute nothing. They get into the wineshops at night and steal from the barrels. When they go fishing in the Pleasure Canal it is only to fill a jam jar full of mud and stagger home at midnight as pissed as the newts they have been able to discern, always out of reach, in the cloudy water.

  But if the Barley brothers felt from afar the warmth of Ashlyme’s disapproval, they did not show it. They continued to grin and snigger nightly in the queue outside Agden Fincher’s pie shop; they continued to hunt rats with their cudgels and Dandy Dinmont dogs among the derelict suburbs of the plague zone, taking huge hauls of these vermin from the boarded-up warehouses and empty cellars and trying to sell them for a shilling a time to astonished restauranteurs on the Margarethestrasse. Their imagination,complained Ashlyme, is vile and wayward. And as if in response to this, they invented donkey jackets, Wellington boots, and small white plastic trays covered in congealed food with which they littered the streets and gutters of Mynned.

  The High City, which had recovered its heart, followed these adventures with an indulgent eye, “Besotted,” as Ashlyme expressed it one day to the Marchioness “L,” “by a vitality it admires but dare not emulate.”

  The Marchioness gave him a vague, propitiatory smile.

  “I’m sure we none of us begrudge them their youth,” she said. “And they do take our minds wonderfully off our present troubles!” She leaned forward. “Master Ashlyme, I fear that Paulinus Rack will have to abandon The Dreaming Boys.” She waved her hand in the general direction of the Low City. “In the present situation we all feel very strongly that we should have something less gloomy in the theatre. Of course, it is a pity that we shall not now see Audsley King’s marvellous stage sets . . .” Here, she left an expectant pause, and when Ashlyme failed to respond, reminded him gently, “Master Ashlyme, we do so rely on you for our news of Audsley King.”

  “Audsley King is near to death,” he answered. “She will not rest but she cannot paint. She has lost faith in her art, herself, everything. Every time I go there she has allowed herself closer to the brink.” He paced agitatedly up and down the studio. “Even now she might be saved. But I will not force her to leave that place. I find that for me to act, the decision must be hers.” He bit his lip. To his horror he found himself admitting, “Marchioness, I am in despair. Can you believe she wishes to die?”

  This question seemed to take the Marchioness by surprise. She stared at him thoughtfully for some time, as if trying to assess his sincerity (or perhaps her own). Then she said meditatively:

  “Did you know that Audsley King was once married to Paulinus Rack?”

  Ashlyme looked at her in astonishment.

  “It was a long time ago. You are certainly too young to remember. The marriage ended when Rack first made his name in the High City, with those sentimental watercolours of life in the Artists’ Quarter. He called them ‘Bohemian days.’ At the Bistro Californium and the Luitpold Café they never forgave him for that. He had been a leading light in their ‘new movement,’ you see. They were all supposed to be above money and that sort of thing. They held a funeral, complete with an ornate coffin, which they said was ‘the funeral of Art in Viriconium.’ Audsley King was the first to throw earth on the coffin when they buried it on Allman’s Heath. Later she claimed that her husband had died of syphilis: a symbolic punishment.”

  The Marchioness thought for a moment. “Of course,” she went on, “Rack’s later behaviour rather tended to confirm their opinion of him.”

  She got up to leave. Pulling on her gloves, she said, “You are very fond of her, Master Ashlyme. You must not allow her to bully you because of that.”

  She paused at Ashlyme’s front door to admire the city. Sunshine and showers had filled the streets of Mynned with a slanting watercolourist’s light; a bank of cloud was advancing from the west, edged at its summit with silver and tinged beneath with the soft purplish grey of pigeon feathers. “What a delightful afternoon it is!” she exclaimed. “I shall walk.” But she lingered on the pavement as if trying to decide whether to add something to what she had already said. “Audsley King, you know, was a spoilt child. She has never made up her mind between public acclaim—which she sees, rightly or wrongly, as destructive of the true artistic impulse—and obscurity, for which she is not temperamentally fitted.”

  Ashlyme said neutrally, “She doesn’t respect the judgement of the High City.”

  “Just so,” said the Marchioness, looking out across the jumbled roofs of the Quarter. “I expect you are right.” She smiled sadly. “We must hope she has more faith in yours.”

  When she had gone, Ashlyme sat in the studio like a stone. “Married to Paulinus Rack!” he said to himself, and, “ ‘Something less gloomy in the theatre’! Has no one told them up here that the world is coming to an end?” He got up suddenly and hurried out. The Marchioness had convinced him, as she had perhaps intended, that action was still possible.

  THE FIFTH CARD

  THE HERMETIC FEAST

  A legacy will come to you from a far-off country. Light, truth, the unravelling of involved matters. In this card everything is revealed. If it comes next to No. 4 it predicts you will fall in the sea.

  “I believe that the ‘Waste Land’ is really the very heart of our problem; a rightful appreciation of its position and significance will place us in possession of the clue which will lead us safely through the most bewildering mazes.”

  JESSIE L. WESTON, From Ritual to Romance

  Afternoon was slipping away into evening as he made his way up the long hill to Alves. He saw immediately that there was something wrong. A strange flat light hung round the old towers, so that he seemed to be looking at them through dirty glass; the cries of the jackdaws as they wheeled round the dome of the derelict palace had a remote and uninflected note, as if they came from much further away; the peeling middle-class villas on the slopes below had aged since his last visit, and their overgrown gardens were full of household rubbish and decaying bricks. A dog trotted aimlessly about in the road ahead of him, sniffing the dust as it whirled round in cold circles. The hill seemed endless. Halfway up it he broke into a run. He could not have explained why.

  Emmet Buffo’s door was open and the damp had blown into his rooms. A stale smell came from the alcove where he did his cooking. He lay under a cheap coloured blanket in the low iron bed by the washstand. He was dead. On the floor beside him were scattered the remains of two or three meals and—as if he had dropped them and never found the strength to pick them up again—
a few small ground-glass lenses of different colours. Beneath the blanket his body had assumed an awkward posture, twisted partly on its side: it was as if it had contracted unevenly after death, curling up like an insect. One thin arm was bent behind his head, while the other hung over the side of the bed, its long, clumsily knuckled hand touching the floor. Perhaps he had been trying to turn over. He looked old. He looked, with his intelligent, tired eyes, his worn, unshaven face, and big raw ears, as defenceless, honest, and undemanding as he had ever done.

  On a table by the bed were some sheets of paper which he had covered with numbered notes in a spiky, erratic hand. Though the notes were unrelated, the numbers gave them a mad air of continuity, as if they were intended as steps in a logical argument. No one has come to visit me in my illness, read one. Hindering the scientist is a crime, it is murdering knowledgein the bud! claimed another. Why have I never received sufficient finance?he asked himself, and answered: Because I have never convinced them of the significance of the stars, among which mankind once flew.

  How long had he lain there, writing when he could, staring at the mouldy shapes on the wall when fatigue overcame him and sleep evaded him, unable to prevent himself from speculating, formulating, rationalising? I must always remember that Art is as important as Science, and containmy impatience!

  Poor Emmet Buffo!—The world had puzzled him by its indifference, but he blamed no one.

  Strewn haphazardly round the room were the curious flannel bandages in which he had swaddled himself for the “rescue” of Audsley King. Ashlyme stared dumbly at them. In his mind’s eye he could see Buffo quite clearly: arguing with the women on the dusty staircase; pushing the empty handcart in erratic spurts along the Rue Serpolet in the rain; hopping from one foot to the other in the deserted observatory as he fought to free himself from the stinking confinement of the horse’s-head mask. How long had he waited for Ashlyme to come and reassure him he was safe?

  The observatory was in disorder. The roof lights had been left open to admit a wet, chilly air, which had stripped from the walls the last of Buffo’s charts. Some crisis in his illness had prompted him to stagger in here and collapse among his telescopes: or perhaps he had simply destroyed them out of despair. Bent brass tubing littered the floor, and when he went over to examine it, Ashlyme felt the little lenses crush beneath his feet like sugared anemones. He rubbed the condensation from a pane of glass and looked out over the Low City. He could see nothing. He could feel nothing. Night was approaching. The ramshackle greenhouse seemed to rush through the twilight like a ship. He had an overwhelming sense of disaster. He knew that if he admired Audsley King, then he had loved Emmet Buffo.

  He bent to the eyepiece of one of the broken telescopes.

  For a second he thought he could see a vast white plain, arranged geometrically, on which were hundreds of stone catafalques, stretching away to a curved horizon. An implacable light slanted down on them, but it began to fade before he had understood the scene before him.

  He heard a sound in the other room.

  When he went to see what it was he found that a detachment of the quarantine police had arrived. They filled the place up. Black uniforms, blue-tinted spectacles, and huge dogs on leads gave them an air of bravado and efficiency. But behind the spectacles their eyes were harassed and nervous, and after a hurried examination of Buffo’s corpse two of them began pouring oil on the bedclothes, the woodwork, and the walls above the bed. Two more pushed past Ashlyme into the observatory and set about smashing windows to create a good through draught. The rest stood about, chuckling over Buffo’s underwear, riffling through his papers, and dragging the dogs off the stale food in the alcove. Despite all this they were not unkind men, and they were surprised to find Ashlyme in the house.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded. “Leave those things alone! Who sent you here?”

  They took him quietly aside. In cases like this, they explained, cremation was the rule: although they didn’t, personally, enjoy the work. “Your father died three days ago, we don’t know what of,” they said. They had only just got round to him, due to pressure of work. “It’s so difficult now to get places to burn properly.” Recently an old woman in Henrietta Street had taken three attempts; a baker’s family at the lower end of the Margarethestrasse, five: all this was very time-consuming. “These rooms should have been sealed until we arrived.” They didn’t know how Ashlyme had got in. It was not that they didn’t admire his courage. But there was nothing he could do here now.

  “He wasn’t my father,” said Ashlyme dully. “Why are you burning him? At least his work should be saved! Look, this is his ‘exterior brain’: it’s not by any means an ordinary library.”

  “It all has to go,” they repeated patiently. They were used to the protests of the bereaved. “We don’t know what he died of, you see. Alves is in the plague zone now. You want to foot it while you can!”

  The plague zone.

  A few minutes later Ashlyme stood in the street staring up at the top of the building. A subdued, almost reluctant explosion shook it suddenly, and glass showered down from the penthouse. Strange slow blue flames issued from the upper windows, flames so pale they seemed transparent against the great black bulk of the hill behind.

  “This house was always in a plague zone,” said Ashlyme bitterly. “That is why all our schemes came to nothing.”

  All at once he was terrified that the same thing might be happening across the city at Audsley King’s house: the thick oil, the smashed windows, the dilatory flames. The only person he could think of who might help him prevent that was the Grand Cairo. He ran off down the hill. When he looked back, the peculiar fire had already lost its force and he could see only a knot of dark figures in the middle of the avenue.

  The High City was cold and bright under the colourless moon of autumn. The echo of Ashlyme’s footsteps came back to him changed and muffled, as if from a place a long distance away. We were all accomplices to Buffo’s death, he thought wildly as he ran, we are all to blame. He had no idea what he meant by this, and it gave him no relief. When at last he came to the Grand Cairo’s tower in Montrouge, he was frightened to go in. All its doors and windows hung open in the pitiless light.

  Inside, hundreds of the dwarf’s followers had killed each other during the early part of the night. They lay mainly on the stairs and in the corridors between the hastily constructed offices and interrogation rooms, their violent and confused shadows frozen on the walls. They had not had time to prepare. Some of them clutched handfuls of hair pulled out or collars torn off during the fighting; others had knives or razors, or improvised strangling cords; most were bitten about the face and hands. Huge glittering unearthly flies, their energy dulled a little by the cold, went from wound to wound in strict rotation in the bright moonlight, making a dry, desultory buzzing as they rose and fell.

  Ashlyme looked at them numbly. He got himself upstairs to a room he recognised from a previous visit, hoping to find someone there who could take him to the Grand Cairo. Attempts had been made to set it on fire. Its occupants had smashed the desk open and soaked their own coats in oil, then applied the charred garments to the flimsy partition wall, which was now full of blackened holes. They had also attempted to burn the documents which spilled out of the fireplace and across the floor. In the end they had given up and killed each other with a paper knife before the flames could take hold. Ashlyme picked up some of the documents.

  Day by day our position becomes more precarious . . . The Barley brothers have named names . . . We now have a handpicked guard at every gate . . . He threw them down again, but not before they had set up in his head a kind of hideous drone which followed him from corridor to corridor and staircase to staircase up the tower.

  All the offices were the same. From a brass voice pipe Ashlyme thought he heard a whisper, but when he spoke into it there was no answer, only a long echoic sigh. He knew that he was now in the country the dwarf had spoken of so often. Intrigue and backs
tabbing and great flies in everything you eat. Ashlyme wiped his hand over his face: if he wasn’t careful, he knew, he could be caught there forever. It was a country that accompanied the dwarf wherever he went; it was an atmosphere that surrounded him, miasmic and pervasive, like the smell of Altaean Balm; he had brought it with him, down from the North or the sky, and visited it on the city. Two thousand men were thrown into fires in one day. Those people had abandoned themselves to conspiracy.

  Flies rose in clouds as Ashlyme made his way into the older places of the tower. Even there, dead men lay facedown among the orange peel and other rubbish in the gloomy carmine-lit passageways. They had daubed slogans on the walls in their own fluids as they waited to die—Up the North, Ya bas, Go back, yellows—their motives so tribal as to be indistinguishable from motivelessness. We are the boys from the second floor!

  A fly settled on his wrist. Its wings were long and papery, and it seemed to have more legs than any fly he had seen in Viriconium. He shuddered and threw it off. Its eyes glittered at him.

  Eventually he found his way into the Grand Cairo’s suite, where for a week or more the dwarf, afraid of the plague, afraid of the Barley brothers and their informants who by now knew almost everything, afraid most of all of his own disintegrating gang, had forbidden anyone to enter. The rooms were dirty and cold, and he had allowed his cats (who, he said, were the only creatures you could trust in this life) the run of them. Just inside the door a servant was sprawled. He had been there for some days. Someone had passed a piece of stiff wire through his head from one ear to the other. A thick sour smell rose from the polished floor, where the cats had dragged chop bones and pies from among the broken crockery on the tray he had been carrying and dipped their unfastidious little tongues in the long sticky spill of “housemaid’s coffee.” Ashlyme went to open the windows.