Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  Audsley King, bundled up in her old fur coat in a last attempt to stop her substance evaporating off into the void which had always surrounded her, was staring at the sketches with a wry, amused expression, and there was blood caked in the corner of her smile.

  “I was free!” Ashlyme recalled her saying once, of her arrival in the Artists’ Quarter from the provinces. “I was free at last, to paint, paint, paint!”

  Now painting had finally exhausted her.

  She had worked desperately in those last few days, filling canvas after canvas. Most of them were simple, almost sentimental, remembered views: golden dreamy colour put down thickly with a palette knife, as—in a kind of fervid tranquillity, an astonishing balancing act of desperation and calm—she sought to recapture a level of her personality she had lost or abandoned long ago. Or had she only wanted refuge from the empty, stretched-out nights of the plague zone? The fortune-teller’s cards had failed her: in opening this other door, onto the idealised landscapes of her youth, had she committed after all that act of escapism she had always so despised? Ashlyme could not be sure. He supposed that now it did not matter.

  Honey-coloured stone, oak and ivy, willows and streams. Her delight poured out of them, paling the yellow lamps, overpowering the first grey suggestions of the coming dawn! A narrow road wound nowhere, choked with last year’s leaves, banked with brambles and the overgrown boles of trees. Nostalgia burned out of the flat southern landscapes like a pain. And she had peopled them not with the tense, repressed, violently static figures of the self-portraits and “fantasies,” but with labourers and farm people, into whose classic postures she had injected a haunted repose.

  Everything is new to me, she had scrawled hastily with a piece of charcoal on the wall above them. New or unrecognisable. What a pity I should die now. And: To die is as if one’s eyes had been put out. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and gone.

  Ashlyme read this message aloud to himself. He blinked. He passed in front of Paulinus Rack and looked down at the sketches on the floor.

  “What do you see there that’s so interesting?” he asked, for he could see nothing. Rack’s exhausted blue eyes followed him without recognition, like the eyes of a china figure in his slack face. Suddenly there issued from his mouth an appalling noise, a low wail in which Ashlyme could discern no words; and he began to rock Audsley King to and fro, to and fro, until for an instant she seemed to reawaken and nod in time to his harsh, rhythmic sobbing. A parody of her old energy filled the thin white face; made voracious again the lines round the mouth; and animated the long hands which had been so full of power.

  Ashlyme couldn’t bear Rack’s grief. He went to the window.

  “You came here too late,” he said distantly. “It’s no good making that noise.”

  It was almost dawn, and the sky had a queer, greyish-yellow caste.

  “What right have you to be here anyway?” He laughed bitterly. “Did you come to save your career with her new paintings? Or persuade her to turn The Dreaming Boys into something ‘a little more cheerful’ for the lazy old women of the High City?”

  “I don’t care if I never see those women again!” shouted Rack violently. He jumped up and grabbed Ashlyme by the shoulders. “I tried so many times to come here! I was afraid, but you wouldn’t help me. At least leave us alone together now!”

  Ashlyme sneered and pulled himself away.

  “Go to the Pleasure Canal and sniff aether until you fall in,” he said.

  “Won’t you help me?” Rack asked him in a softer voice. “I believe she’s still alive.”

  “You’re mad, Rack.”

  Together they carried her down into the Rue Serpolet. It was not the kind of work they were used to, so they went slowly and carefully. Outside on the pavement a crowd of people had gathered to stare into the sky. When Ashlyme looked up it was dawn and he could see the two huge princes of the city hanging in the air above the Artists’ Quarter, resplendent in their horned and lobed scarlet armour. Mounted on vast white horses, they moved through the morning sky like a new constellation. One of those princes has a wound which will never heal. His blood falls from it as a rain of white flowers onto the city beneath: which even now begins to waken from its long, grey, debilitating dream.

  EPILOGUE

  One day a long time afterwards, when Ashlyme was looking through a drawer for some pencils he thought he’d put there, he came across the fish’s-head mask Emmet Buffo had made him wear during their doomed visit to the Rue Serpolet. He was no longer quite so afraid of it as he had been. “Absurd thing!” he thought, while for its part it eyed him lugubriously enough—fat-lipped, stupid, shedding scales. It filled him with a kind of ashamed affection for Buffo, and for himself as he had been then. It reminded him suddenly of cod and saffron, of a bright morning in the cisPontine Quarter, and the old man who lived behind “Our Lady of the Zincsmiths.” He decided he would take it back where it belonged.

  The old paved square was exactly as he remembered it. If it was not so warm, then it was just as sunny: the pale clear light of a late-December afternoon slanted across the cobbles and lapped the blackened hulk of the old church. The children, as before, were playing noisily at “blind Michael,” and Ashlyme could hear the women laughing and squabbling in the houses. He felt suddenly elated, though he couldn’t have explained why.

  SELLER, announced the partly obliterated sign above the old man’s shop. Ashlyme stood for a moment smiling into its small dusty window, where a ray of sun had warmed the fur of the stuffed animals until it was the colour of newly fallen oak leaves, then went inside.

  Birds, stiff and silent, watched him from every shelf, their heads cocked forever intelligently on one side, their eyes made of glass. The workroom at the back had the sweet, woody smell of old books and chamomile tea. Ashlyme picked his way between bales of rag to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Hello?” he called.

  There was no answer, but he sensed the old man was up there: alert, shy, breathing shallowly and waiting for him to go away. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I came here once with your friend Emmet Buffo.”

  Silence.

  Ashlyme shrugged. If he waited quietly the old man’s curiosity would bring him down. Perhaps he would have another metal feather. Meanwhile he took out the fish’s-head mask and unfolded it carefully. He put it down on a workbench next to the soft wire armature which would one day support the outstretched wings of a little hawk with furious eyes.

  “Old man? I cannot stay for long . . .”

  Wrinkling his nose, he turned over some of the rags on the floor. Among them he found a bit of heavily worked tapestry which he thought might do as a curtain. He unfolded it nervously, having learned his lesson from the last one he had picked up. It was stained yet luminous; it had been splendid once. It showed a man in the extreme yellow of age, as bald as an egg, walking between two huge buildings. The road under his feet was carpeted with the crushed husks of insects, and a shadowy figure accompanied him on his left side, a child or a dwarf mounted on a donkey. This figure, its face partly obscured by dirt, fascinated Ashlyme. He lifted the tapestry to the light so that he could see it better.

  As he did so there came a loud clatter of wings from the room upstairs. Suddenly the shop seemed to be full of shadows.

  A large bird had flown in through an open window, he wrote later in his journal. I thought I heard a reedy voice speak indistinctly in the gloom. I put the tapestry down and walked quickly out into the sunshine.

  THE LAMIA & LORD CROMIS

  THE LAMIA & LORD CROMIS

  The apologists or historians of the city—Verdigris, Kubin, Saent Saar— tended to describe it at that time in terms of its emblems and emblematic contradictions. An ace in the gutter, a leopard made of flowers, says Verdigris in Some Remarks to My Dog, hoping to suggest a whole comprised of hints, causal lacunae, reversing hierarchies: Where the city is at its emptiest we find ourselves full.

  For Saent Sa
ar, comfortable under the patronage of a marchioness, this was more than enough. Less desperate perhaps, and more aware of a kind of slippage in the city’s perception of itself, certainly more conscious of his responsibilities, he has it that we see in her very failures of sense a twinning of contingency and the urge to form. The city is inventing herself, in locutions partial and accidental, like a woman rehearsing the contents of an old letter. She lost it long ago. She may even have forgotten who it came from. If she were to see it now, its careful phrases would surprise her by their lack of resemblance to what she has made of them.

  Such a view, as acceptable to the Artists’ Quarter as to Mynned, would have been regarded in the provinces with fear. There they looked to the capital, which they called “Uriconium,” “Vriko,” or sometimes “the Jewel on the Edge of the Western Sea,” for stability. One of its minor princes learned the irony of this at first hand. His name was tegeus-Cromis.

  He arrived at Duirinish—then a thriving fish-and-wool town on the coast a hundred miles north of the city—towards the end of December, and after making enquiries at a secondhand bookshop and a taxidermist’s, went in the evening to the Blue Metal Discovery, where he sat down in the long smoky parlour at a table some way from the fire. It turned out that he had come by horse, through the Monar passes, which at that time of the year were beginning to be icy and difficult. One or two of his fellow customers knew this; they shook their heads admiringly. One or two more, who thought they knew why he had come, watched him circumspectly while the wind drove sleet across the bleak cobbles of Replica Square. The rest—rentiers, small landowners from the Low Leedale, coming men in the fur and metal trade—watched him simply because he was a minor prince and they had never seen one before.

  It had been a raw afternoon and he looked cold. Otherwise it was hard to know what to make of him. He wore a sword but carried a book (The Hunting of the Jolly Wren). While he walked quickly and energetically, like a young man, when you got close you saw he was grey-haired and preoccupied, and for a moment this was unnerving. In the end they would have put it that though the steel rings on his fingers were bulky, aristocratic, cut into the very complex seals of his House, his boots were a bit cheap and dirty. They wouldn’t have expected a prince’s boots to be like that.

  They asked him would he come nearer the fire. There was plenty of room!

  But if he struck them as lonely, even diffident, he was also as perfectly unresponsive as only a minor prince can be. They were interested in him, but he was not so interested in them; they soon left him to himself, tall and polite in a heavy bice velvet cloak. Evening wore into night and he smiled faintly at the remains of his meal. He seemed to be waiting for someone.

  (He was thinking: Last December I watched the early snow fall in the High City. That morning, when it looked as if the weather would improve, I sat in the Charcuterie Vivien hoping the sun would come out. Someone I had been expecting arrived, or spoke, or smiled. We were to go skating the next day if it froze. Moments like this seemed permanent but they cannot be repaired; I cannot now regenerate them. And that is not to go back very far.)

  Just after midnight a boy came down from the upper rooms of the inn and began to go round from group to group in the parlour, laughing and talking animatedly. Little notice was taken of him. As far as the prince could tell he was trying to collect money—a strange, graceless-looking child fourteen or fifteen years old, who could reach out very quickly and catch a moth in one hand, then release it unharmed. Every lamp had ten or a dozen of these creatures, with their dark green and purple wings, circling it frantically: the boy was able to perform his trick again and again. At the fire they affected not to see him, though he caught a moth for each of them. They seemed uncomfortable.

  “Well,” said the boy loudly at last. “No one born today will ever be drowned or hanged, that’s something.”

  Though he didn’t understand the joke of this, the prince found himself laughing. A moment later the boy came over to speak to him.

  “Look, watch the moth.”

  “You don’t seem to have had much luck over there,” said tegeus-Cromis when he had examined the insect; he found that he could catch it quite easily, but not without breaking its wings. “Still, they’re a careful lot in the fur and metal trade.”

  The boy looked at him oddly, then he laughed too.

  “Oh, they all know me,” he said. “They all know me, my lord.”

  He sat down.

  “I was waiting for someone, but not for you,” tegeus-Cromis told him. “Do I pay you for my moth?”

  “You rode over the passes on some old nag,” said the boy. “I heard.”

  He put his hand to his mouth. “Did that sound awful? I always say something like that, I don’t know why. Do you ever say something you don’t mean like that? I expect it’s a beautiful horse, isn’t it, probably a thoroughbred, and now you’re hurt. I’m sorry.

  “Look, here’s a live one: try again. Fast but not so rough. There! You’re getting the idea.” He shivered. “I was in Vriko once,” he said. “Artists’ Quarter. Phew! That’s no city for a lad like me. Six in the morning a smell so foul came up from the Yser Canal you thought it would rust the lamp-posts. Everything was filthy, but if we wanted a wash we had to go to the baths in Mosaic Lane. Do you know Mosaic Lane, my lord? They had some famous pictures there but you couldn’t see them for dirt; the boy I was with scratched it off and saw a face just like his own. Really. Sometimes the water isn’t like water at all; it smells of perished rubber.”

  He stared ahead thoughtfully. His hair, very dark red and cut in a “coup sauvage” once popular in the Tinmarket, made his eyes seem very large and young. Ribbons of various colours were tied to his clothes. His throat was bare, the skin smooth and olive-coloured.

  “We lived in a house near Ox Lip Lane.”

  tegeus-Cromis laughed.

  “It’s a long time since the Artists’ Quarter looked like that,” he said. “The Yser Spa fell into its own cistern; that was the end of the murals. There’s a courtyard there now with an apple tree in it, and Ox Lip Lane is all little shops which have tubs of geraniums outside them on the pavement. If you saw it now, I suppose, you’d love it.”

  “Would I?” said the boy quietly. “I’d hate it. It would have no soul.”

  “Soul!” said tegeus-Cromis, who had often thought the same thing. “I don’t believe you were ever there anyway. How old are you? Thirteen?”

  They smiled at one another.

  For a few minutes neither of them said anything. Then the prince, looking over the ruins of his dinner for some offer he could make, held out his pewter snuffbox. The boy shook his head slowly, but after some thought pulled apart a piece of bread and ate it. He drank some wine too, tilting back his head and gasping. Someone came up from the group round the fire, put a coin contemptuously on the table in front of him, and said, “Well then?” The boy shrugged. He got up and went into the middle of the parlour, recited rapidly three times, in a high voice devoid of expression or implication,

  Johnny Jack all hung with rag dolls

  Although he is small his family is great

  and began to dance in a way which managed to be both clumsy and graceful. There was no music. His big wooden shoes thudded on the bare boards; he frowned with concentration and effort, breathing noisily through his mouth. The ribbons on his arms whirled in the lamplight, leaving coloured spiral afterimages. “The effect was quite touching,” tegeus-Cromis would say to him later: “But your arms are too thin.” There was no applause. When he had finished, the boy simply stood where he was until he had got his breath back, then went round the parlour again, catching moths, collecting money, laughing and chattering affectedly. It had not been an entertainment, the prince saw. Put out that the boy had not come straight back to his table, he opened his book and pretended to read:

  “Make him a bed of earth bark, ewe daisy, five-finger blossom.”

  He looked puzzledly at the cover of the book, put
it down, and closed his eyes. He was tired. He saw quite clearly the great seracs collapsing up among the Monar icefields. He crossed under them, once, twice: again.

  There was a red flush under the boy’s cheekbones when he did come back to the table, and he was still panting a little. “I’m older than that,” he said, as if they had never been interrupted. Then: “What have you come here for?”

  tegeus-Cromis opened his eyes.

  “What do they say by the fire?”

  “To hunt. I knew that, too.” He leaned forward suddenly and took the prince’s hands between both of his own, which were warm and had a kind but papery touch. “Look, my dear,” he said, “why let it kill you, too?” He glanced round the room. The fire had burned down, the parlour was emptying, someone was collecting the empty pots. A door opened towards the back and a smell of urine came in on a cold draught. He let go of the prince’s hands and made a gesture which encompassed not just the parlour, or the inn, but the cobbled square outside it, and the town beyond that. “It belongs here. It’s their responsibility. No one would want to see you killed.”

  At this the prince caught his cloak a bit closer round him. “Some people are coming to help me,” he explained. “They should have been here by now. When the door opened, I thought that was them.”

  Later the boy asked him: “Which House are you from?”

  “The Sixth.”

  “What’s your emblem?”

  tegeus-Cromis showed him one of the rings he wore.

  “The Lamia. Here. See?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “It doesn’t look like anything.”

  In the end only the potboy was in the parlour to see them get up and leave together; the prince’s friends had been delayed.

  The boy went in the night.

  “You’ll always be able to find me,” he said.

  In the morning the prince was woken by an altercation at the back of the inn. He had been given one of the rooms there as soon as he arrived. They were sought after because they were large, but this in itself made them seem cold and empty; and while they were supposed to be quieter than the rooms at the front, which faced Replica Square, they had the disadvantage of looking obliquely onto the stableyard. The stables, unlike the rest of the inn, were built of brick—a warm red kind more often seen in the South—and now stood bright and sharp under the blue winter sky. In the yard he could see, if he pressed one cheek against the glass and twisted his head to look out at an angle, two or three heavily laden ponies and a horse of some quality, short-coupled and powerful, with good “ends” and plenty of bone, about nineteen hands high. They were framed by an arch or passageway which further limited his vision, but which amplified the shouts and exclamations of the people gathered round them.