Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  There had been a frost: it lay thickly on the setts in the corner of the yard the sun had not yet reached. The air was cold and transparent, giving to the scene—or that part of it the prince could see—a distinctness, a vigour, which amounted almost to gaiety. The big horse was plunging, striking out in a temper. It sent a bucket rolling across the cobbles, spilling water in a spiral in the morning light. Figures bobbed panickily under the animal’s hooves, trying to secure it; or lounged laughing and giving advice; or went hurriedly to and fro across the arch waving their arms, vanishing before he was able to identify them.

  One of them was dressed in a meal-coloured cloak: did the horse belong to him? tegeus-Cromis knew it did, but now everything had vanished into his breath, which lay on the cold windowpane like the bloom on a grape. He wiped it off, then, growing tired of the uncomfortable position he had to maintain to see anything, tried to open the window. When it resisted he shrugged and went back into the room, barefoot across the chilly oak floor, to the things of his he had arranged on a table by the bed—the pewter snuffbox in need of a polish, his rings scattered like dice, one or two books. The sword, which had been his father’s, was propped in a corner. He dressed quickly, feeling elated for no reason.

  In the south, especially in the Mingulay Peninsula where the caravans are full of fortune-tellers and their greasy tarot cards, a woman will often stunt the growth of her first child so that the lucrative career of dwarf is available to it in later life. This she does by confining it to a black oak box they call the “gloottokoma” and by feeding it discriminately, while with the help of the cards she stares paralysed into an uncertain future. The dwarf who now stood on one side of the parlour hearth, warming his deformed spine at a few newish reluctant flames, had made a great success in the arena at Uriconium as a clown and a tumbler. For a time a figure so well known on the Unter-Main-Kai that he had been painted in a red and purple doublet as “Calabacillas, Lord of Misrule” by Audsley King (then at the height of her own brief fashion), he was a founder member of both the Yellow Paper Code and the Cheminor Stilt Walkers, under whose aegis he had killed—in and out of the ring, and more or less fairly—a score of opponents larger than himself.

  His name was Morgante, but he was often called Rotgob. His buckled legs gave him a gait which looked feeble, rolling, and uncertain, until you saw him run like an ape across a piece of waste ground at night, up near Allman’s Heath. He had intelligent features and a sweet smile but was prone like many products of the “gloottokoma” to bouts of depression and viciousness, during which he would cry bitterly and kick out at anyone who came near him. He had attained at his full growth—when he was sixteen or seventeen years old and already had the arena crowd in the palm of his fat, undeveloped-looking little hand—a height of about four feet.

  He was seen habitually in the company of the prince, and of a very tall man called Dissolution Kahn, who stood on the other side of the hearth saying in a cold voice as tegeus-Cromis entered the parlour:

  “And yet you agreed. You were quick enough to agree yesterday.”

  “I am a liar as well as a dwarf.”

  “Yes,” the Kahn now admitted with a remote sigh. “We all know that.”

  When Rotgob saw tegeus-Cromis he ran round the parlour turning somersaults and shouting, “I’m a liar as well as a dwarf! I’m a liar as well as a dwarf!” until he was out of breath. Then he started to tug at the prince’s sword. “Give me that at once!” he said. “Do you want to hurt yourself?” When the prince tried to join in this game, resisting him with a smile, he only burst into peals of fantastic laughter and jumped onto the mantelpiece, where he sat dangling his legs and staring down as if from a great height; later he took out and began to whet his own weapon, a thing halfway between an extremely long stiletto and a rather short rapier, which he kept in a startling ornamental sheath.

  The prince insisted they should have breakfast with him.

  Dissolution Kahn drew his chair up close and said, “We came as soon as we could.”

  He was a large man, and favoured clothes which he thought showed this off to best advantage: orange breeches tucked into great oxblood-coloured boots; enormous camel-hair cloaks; shirts in violet or pink lawn, with slashed and scalloped sleeves. People pointed him out as an example of an excellent horseman, and to carry him and his mail armour—which he hardly ever wore—he always preferred to have massive, ill-tempered horses. His sparse yellow hair curled anarchically round his jowled and bearded features. He had a dangerous reputation in the city, but once you knew him you became aware of his rather watery blue eyes and pendulous underlip.

  “We came as soon as we could. Do you know anything for certain?”

  tegeus-Cromis shook his head.

  “The sign is good, and rumour makes the animal one of the Eight. But what do they know in places like this? It seems to have killed twice near Orves, leaving sign; three times at some houses on a hill near the edge of the town—a child and two women there; again the sign was good, very plain—and once, possibly, in the square behind us. They’ve been very nervous since then.”

  The Kahn shrugged. “What can you expect?” he said contemptuously.

  “You’ll be frightened before we’re finished,” predicted the dwarf. “You’ll piss your pants.” He crumbled some bread and ate it carefully, trying to save his teeth. “What’s wrong with that?” He thought for a minute, then said: “It will be in the marsh. When do we start?”

  “Until someone else is killed I can connect nothing with nothing,” the prince was forced to admit. “It would be fatal to move too soon; the books are clear on that if nothing else. Old sign can mean everything or nothing. I’ve had it put about that I am from the Sixth House: they’ll call me as soon as anything happens.”

  “They’ll be glad to,” said the Kahn.

  He laughed. He got up.

  “I’m going to see how they’re doing with the mare,” he said. “She’s a bit slow to settle, that one.”

  When he opened the parlour door cold air blew across the breakfast table, smelling bitter and metallic and drawing the spit into their mouths. “The marsh,” said Dissolution Kahn, as if he could see it in front of him. “No stink nastier,” he observed, “and it upsets her.”

  “Is that what I’ve been smelling all morning?” said the prince.

  He had started to read The Hunting of the Jolly Wren. He looked up but the Kahn had already gone out. The dwarf swung himself quietly onto the mantelpiece, where it was warmer. “If you give me your sword I’ll sharpen it,” he said. “My prince.”

  tegeus-Cromis spent some of the days that followed with the boy who caught the moths; in the end he knew him no better.

  Once they walked up to Orves and sat on the edge of the old fortifications to look out at Leedale with its fields and sheep. On the slopes below, the prince noticed several spiral lanes as steep as staircases, arranged in a complicated pattern on the hill and screened from one another by wind-eroded hedges. Damp snow had fallen. The December light, reflected back and forth between the fields and the heavy bluish sky, faded slowly, prolonging the afternoon into evening so that it seemed earlier in the year than it was. At the last minute, as the air turned grey and cold and the snow seemed to suck up the light rather than give it out, everything seemed to stand out suddenly very black and stark: the trees like fan coral, the three-storey weavers’ houses, the stone walls and hanging quarries of the Leedale hillsides. Next day the snow had turned to rain; after that it was frost again.

  Once he said to the boy:

  “You know, the old Artists’ Quarter wasn’t so bad. There was always blossom on the ornamental rowan behind the railings in Mecklenburgh Square; and I can remember quite clearly the scent of black-currant gin spilled across the planished top of some corner table in the Plain Moon Café! Rack, Ashlyme, Kristodulos, they were all still alive and working in the Quarter. You felt the Yser like a warning behind you, but in the evenings they strung coloured paper lanterns across t
he gardens in Mynned, and everyone talked. We had all that new art, new philosophy, new thought: in those days everyone seemed to be inventing something!”

  “I was never there,” said the boy. “Was I?”

  They laughed.

  Once the boy said to him, “Let someone else get rid of it. I don’t want you to be hurt,” and he could only reply, “This animal, whatever it is, has fought an ancestor of mine in every generation. It killed my father, and he killed it. It killed my grandfather and he killed it. You see the implication of this. In this way, the books I have spent my life with tell me, some balance is preserved; something which would otherwise be constantly in the world is kept out of it. Much of the rest of what they tell me is opaque, I admit.”

  He considered this for a moment, then shrugged.

  “If this is the Sixth Beast—I suspect it is—my duty’s clear. I’m the scion of the Sixth House: see, it says on the ring, under the snake. The blood is another kind of book. I can’t escape what’s written there.”

  “You don’t care about me, then?”

  “Some texts suggest, or seem to, that if I survive the encounter the animal will never come back.”

  Once, he thought he understood the expression in the boy’s eyes. But when he woke up he had forgotten, and that night late they called him to see a dead man in a dull house on a quiet cobbled street near the inn. The attack had taken place at the top of the house, in a small room to the walls of which were fastened some charts of the night sky done in a clever hand. An open skylight framed the fading Name Stars and admitted occasional eddies of cold air.

  Two or three of the victim’s neighbours—uncertain whether they had been woken by shouting or by some other noise which mimicked it—were in the room when the prince got there, wrinkling their noses at a strong, musty, but not precisely unpleasant smell. Immediately he noticed this, the prince ordered the lamps to be extinguished. He lit a small piece of orange candle he had brought with him and studied its flame intently for about thirty seconds. Whatever he saw there did not satisfy him; he made an impatient gesture. tegeus-Cromis often imagined he had made long ago some fundamentally unrealistic assumption about people, one which had undermined his judgement in that direction: but the behaviour of the Sixth Beast, inasmuch as it was clear to anyone, was clear to him. It couldn’t hide itself from him.

  “You can light the lamps again,” he said, and, pinching the candle out abruptly, added to himself, “I would have expected better.”

  Everyone was impressed by his cursory examination of the victim.

  This man, who was well known around the fire in the parlour of the Blue Metal Discovery, wore a heavy fur robe. Under it he was naked. His greying flesh had the consistency, the prince noted, of coarse blotting paper; ringlets covered what remained of his skull. He had tumbled over among his collection of astrological instruments and now lay among them with an embarrassed expression, as if he had fallen heavily while demonstrating it to someone. One hand still clutched a little brass orrery. The other had fetched up incongruous and waxy-looking against the skirting board some way away from the rest of the body, as though the animal had pulled it off in an afterthought. While he noticed all this, the prince seemed to concentrate on the fingernails of the hand that remained attached. Their shape he examined with great care (in fact he compared it briefly to some illustrations in a compact leather-bound directory).

  As soon as he had seen enough he took the orrery away from the dead man and set it in motion. It was a delightful thing. Jewelled planets hurried round the little sun; you could hardly hear the clockwork. He was aware perhaps of the effect this had on the other occupants of the room.

  “Nothing was seen?”

  They had seen nothing, they said, because they had been asleep. It was the noise that had woken them. “We all thought at first it was him screaming.”

  “We all thought that at first.”

  He wanted to know next if the gatewardens had been alerted. Someone was sent to find out. Reports were to be confused for some time, but later it became clear that they had seen nothing, either, though a trail had been found quickly enough, aberrant but leading eventually out of Duirinish, of blood. “Ah,” said the prince, apparently thinking of something else: “The blood.” He watched the rotation of the planets through a complete cycle; another began, but was interrupted almost immediately by a commotion on the stairs.

  “What a mess in here!” said Morgante the dwarf, bursting in and walking importantly round the corpse, his hands clasped in the hollow of his back, while Dissolution Kahn studied puzzledly the star charts. “This is a very unprofessional job. Who was he?”

  “Someone in the fur and metal trade. The Kahn had better get our horses ready.”

  They left Duirinish shortly after it got light, following a difficult spoor.

  After some miles, lanes and narrow greenways began to slip in all directions down the strike of the country, losing height through little identical dry valleys and nick points in the limestone terraces. The animal had got into them an hour or two before. It was cold; the wind smelled of metal; Dissolution Kahn was often obliged to be firm with his horse.

  In two hours they had reached the northeast limit of Leedale. The characteristic bracken and gorse of the valley soon gave out onto poorly drained moorland where dikes had been sunk at right angles to all tracks, to keep the sheep from wandering. The dwarf sang to himself in a droning voice; at every ditch he looked down and said,

  “You wouldn’t like to fall in there, would you?”

  By mid-morning they had crossed the last of them and entered the marsh.

  It began as a few thickets of low trees, strangely shaped but still recognisable as thorn or bullace, through which meandered a river flanked by dense reedbeds a bright unnatural ochre colour. The thickets closed up; the river was soon lost, going to feed iron bogs, then quicksands of suspended magnesium or aluminium alloys, and finally sumps of thick whitish slurry marbled with streaks of mauve or oily cadmium yellow. What paths there were wound between steep-sided pits, along crumbling ridges and promontories of soft discoloured earth. The trees of the interior were of quite unknown kinds, black and burnt-orange, with smooth-barked tapering stems; their tightly woven foliage, rarely more than fifteen feet above the surface of the bog, tinted the light a frail organic pink, which seemed sometimes to be veined like the lobe of a very delicate ear. Moving furtively, as if they had been crippled, or as if they had only just learned how to breath air, frogs and small lizards floundered from sump to sump; they swam with equal difficulty, hurt perhaps by the water, and after some apparently aimless, undirected activity, always struggled to leave it at the same place they had entered. There were insects in the trees, with papery, inutile wings a foot long; they seemed to have too many legs.

  At noon the trees thinned out a little.

  It was bitterly cold. In the pale, slanting winter light the east wind coated everything in a transparent skin more flexible than ice but nothing like air. For thirty minutes they were able to travel along an old, abandoned road. It was foundering in the soft ground. The shadows of the trees fell distinct but washed-out across its white, tilted surface. “Who would want to make a road in a place like this?” The cold had locked up the moisture in everything—mud, stone, vegetation—so that it looked like bone and they were glad to get under the canopy again.

  The horses were intractable. Disoriented by the prawn-coloured “sky,” they would refuse to move, bracing their legs and trembling, then turn rolling white eyes on Dissolution Kahn who, dismounting, swore and sank to his boot-tops in the slime, releasing from it enormous acrid bubbles. By the middle of the short winter afternoon they had lost one of the ponies to quicksand. The other died after drinking from a clear pool, rapid swelling of its limbs followed by gushes of blood from the corroded glands and internal organs. Rotgob was able to save one of the loads. The other, which contained food, was lost.

  Over all this presided the smell of corrupt metal.
tegeus-Cromis’s mouth was coated with bitter deposits; he felt poisoned, and found it difficult to speak. Though he had always known what to expect, he seemed numb for much of the day, gazing automatically at whatever presented itself to his eyes while he allowed his horse to stumble and slither about beneath him. He had slipped into a reverie in which he saw himself riding over sunny cobbles into a courtyard somewhere in the cisPontine Quarter, entry to which was gained by a narrow brick arch. It was familiar to him, though at the same time he could not remember having been there before. Fish was being sold from a cart at one end of the square; at the other rose the dark bulk of “Our Lady of the Zincsmiths”: children ran excitedly from one to the other in the sunshine, squabbling over a bit of pavement marked out for a hopping game, “blind Michael.” As the prince’s horse clattered under the arch he heard a woman’s voice singing to a mandolin, and the air was full of the smells of cod and saffron.

  Suddenly aware of the blood and its unbearable heritage, he jerked awake and said:

  “We must get on!”

  The dwarf looked at him compassionately. It was evening. They were tired and filthy. They had long ago lost the animal’s spoor.