Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  (In the morning these lads sell sugared anemones in the Rivelin market. They run errands for the cardsharps. But by the afternoon their eyes have become distant, thoughtful, excited: they cannot wait for the night, when they will put on their loose, girlish woollen jackets and tight leather breeches to become the handlers and nurses of the men who wear the meal-coloured cloak. What are we to make of them? They are thin and ill-fed, but so devout. They walk with a light tread. Even their masters do not understand them.)

  An oldish man sat on a stool among the members of his faction while two apprentices prepared him. They had already taken off his cloak and his mail shirt, and supported his right wrist with a canvas strap. They had pulled the grey hair back from his face, fastening it with an ornamental steel clasp. Now they were rubbing embrocation into his stiff shoulder muscles. He ignored them, staring emptily at the blackened posts waiting for him like corpses pulled out of a bog. He hardly seemed to feel the cold, though his bare scarred arms were purple with it. Once he inserted two fingers beneath the strapping on his wrist to make sure it was tight enough. His sword was propped up against his knees. Idly he pushed the point of it down between two cobbles and began to lever them apart.

  When one of the apprentices leaned forward and whispered something in his ear, it appeared that he wouldn’t answer: then he cleared his throat as if he had not spoken to anybody for a long time and said,

  “I’ve never heard of him. If I had I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Some little pisser from Mynned?”

  The boy smiled lovingly down at him.

  “I will always follow you, Practal. Even if he cuts your legs off.”

  Practal reached up and imprisoned the boy’s delicate wrist.

  “If he kills me you’ll run off with the first poseur who comes in here wearing soft shoes!”

  “No,” said the boy. “No!”

  Practal held his arm a moment longer, then gave a short laugh. “More fool you,” he said, but he seemed to be satisfied. He went back to prising at the loose setts.

  The Mammy’s man came into the yard late, surrounded by courtiers in yellow velvet cloaks who had escorted him down from Mynned. Practal had a look at them and spat on the cobbles. The inn was quiet now. From its half-open door a few sightseers—mostly costermongers from Rivelin but with a leaven of touts and sharps local to the Dryad’s Saddle— watched, placing bets in low voices while smoke moved slowly in the light and warmth behind them.

  The Mammy’s man ignored Practal. He kicked vaguely at each wooden post as he came to it and stared about as if he had forgotten something, a tall youth with big, mad-looking eyes and hair which had been cut and dyed so that it stuck up from his head like a crest of scarlet spines. He had on a light green cloak with an orange lightning flash embroidered on the back; when he took it off the crowd could see that instead of a mail shirt he was wearing a kind of loose chenille blouse. Practal’s clique made a lot of this, laughing and pointing. He gazed blankly at them, then with a disconnected motion pulled the blouse off and tore it in half. This seemed to annoy the court men, who moved away from him and stood in a line along the fourth side of the yard, ostentatiously sniffing pomanders.

  Practal said disgustedly, “They’ve sent a child.”

  They had. His chest was thin and white; low down, two huge abscesses had healed as conical pits. His back was long and hollow. A greenish handkerchief was knotted round his throat. He looked undeveloped but at the same time broken down.

  “No wonder he needed an escort.”

  He must have heard this, but he went on lurching randomly about, chewing on something he had in his mouth. Then he scratched his queer coxcomb violently, knelt down, and rummaged through the garments he had discarded until he came up with a ceramic sheath about a foot long. When the crowd saw this there was some excited betting, most of it against Practal; the Locust Clan looked uneasy. Hissing through his teeth as if he were soothing a horse, the Queen’s man jerked the power-knife out of its sheath and made a few clumsy passes with it. It gave off a dreary, lethal buzzing noise and a cloud of pale motes which wobbled away into the wet air like drugged moths; and as it went it left a sharp line of light behind it in the gloom.

  Osgerby Practal shrugged.

  “He’ll need long arms to use that,” he said.

  Someone called out the rules. The moment one of the combatants was cut, he lost. If either of them stepped outside the notional square defined by the posts, he would be judged as having conceded. No one was to be killed (although this happened more often than not). Practal paid no attention. The boy nodded interestedly as each point was made, then walked off, smiling and whistling.

  Mixed fights were uncommon. Practal, who had some experience of them, kept his sword down out of the way of the power-knife, partly to reduce the risk of having it chopped in half, partly so his opponent would be tempted to come to him. The boy adopted a flat footed stance, and after a few seconds of uncoordinated circling began to pant heavily. All at once the power-knife streaked out between them, fizzing and spitting like a firework. The crowd gasped, but Practal only stepped sideways and let it pass. Before the boy could regain his balance, the flat of Practal’s sword had smacked him on the ear. He fell against one of the corner posts, holding the side of his head and blinking.

  The courtiers clicked their tongues impatiently.

  “Come out of that corner and show us a fight,” suggested someone from the Locust Clan. There was laughter.

  The boy spoke for the first time. “Go home and look between your wife’s legs, comrade,” he said. “I think I left something there last night.”

  This answer amused the crowd further. While he was grinning round at them, Practal hit him hard in the ear again. This time the power-knife fell out of his hand and started to eat its way into the cobbles an inch from his foot, making a dull droning noise. He stood there looking down at it and rubbing his ear.

  The point of Practal’s sword rested against the boy’s diaphragm. But the boy refused to look at him, so Practal lowered it and went back to his stool. He sat down with his back to the square while his apprentices wiped his face with a towel, murmuring encouragement in low voices, and gave him a dented flask. He held it up.

  “Want some?” he called over his shoulder. The crowd appreciated this: there was some cheering even from people who had backed the other corner.

  “That piss?” said the boy. “Soon I’ll drink the lot.”

  Practal jumped to his feet so quickly he knocked the stool over.

  “Fair enough then!” he shouted, his face red. “Come on!”

  But nothing happened. The boy only hacked with his heel at a ridge of hard old ice the apprentices had left sticking to the cobbles in the centre of the square, while the power-knife, held negligently close to his right leg, flickered and sent up whitish motes which floated above the crowd, giving off a sickly smell. He seemed worried.

  “This square has been badly set up,” he said.

  The court faction shifted irritably; the crowd jeered.

  “I don’t care about that,” said Practal, and threw himself into a sustained, tight, very technical attack, controlling the momentum of the sword with practised figures-of-eight so that it shone and flashed in the light from the inn door. Practal’s faction cheered and waved their arms. The boy was forced into a clumsy retreat, and when his foot caught the ridge of ice in the centre of the square he fell over with a cry. Practal brought the sword down hard. The boy smiled. He moved his head quickly out of the way, and with a clang the blade buried itself between two cobblestones. Even as Practal tried to lever it clear, the boy reached round behind his legs and cut the tendons at the back of his knee.

  Practal seemed surprised.

  “That’s not the way to fight with a weapon like that,” he began, as if he was advising his apprentice.

  He let go of the sword and wandered unsteadily about the square with his mouth open, holding the backs of his legs. The boy followed him about int
erestedly until he collapsed, then knelt down and put his face close to Practal’s to make sure he was listening. “My name is Ignace Retz,” he said quietly. Practal bit the cobbles. The boy raised his voice so that the crowd could hear. “My name is Ignace Retz, and I daresay you will remember it.”

  “Kill me,” said Practal. “I’ll not walk now.”

  Ignace Retz shook his head. A groan went through the crowd. Retz walked over to the apprentice who was holding Practal’s mail shirt and meal-coloured cloak. “I will need a new shirt and cloak,” he announced loudly, “so that these kind people are not tempted to laugh at me again.” After he had taken the clothes, to which he was entitled by the rules, he returned the power-knife to its sheath, handling it more warily than he had done during the fight. He looked tired. One of the courtiers touched him on the arm and said coldly, “It is time to go back to the High City.”

  Retz bowed his head.

  As he was walking towards the inn door, with the mail shirt rolled up into a heavy ball under one arm and the cloak slung loosely round his shoulders, Practal’s apprentice came and stood in his way, shouting, “Practal was the better man! Practal was the better man!”

  Retz looked down at him and nodded.

  “So he was.”

  The apprentice began to weep. “The Locust Clan will not allow you to live for this!” he said wildly.

  “I don’t suppose they will,” said Ignace Retz.

  He rubbed his ear. The courtiers hurried him out. Behind him the crowd had gone quiet. As yet, no bets were being paid out.

  Mammy Vooley held a disheartening court. She had been old when the Northmen brought her to the city after the War of the Two Queens, and now her body was like a long ivory pole about which they had draped the faded purple gown of her predecessor. On it was supported a very small head, which looked as if it had been partly scalped, partly burned, and partly starved to death in a cage suspended above the Gabelline Gate. One of her eyes was missing. She sat on an old carved wooden throne with iron wheels, in the middle of a tall limewashed room that had five windows. Nobody knew where she had come from, not even the Northmen whose queen she had replaced. Her intelligence never diminished. At night the servants heard her singing in a thin whining voice, in some language none of them knew, as she sat among the ancient sculptures and broken machines that are the city’s heritage.

  Ignace Retz was ushered in to see her by the same courtiers who had led him down to the fight. They bowed to Mammy Vooley and pushed him forward, no longer bothering to disguise the contempt they felt for him. Mammy Vooley smiled at them. She extended her hand and drew Retz down close to her bald head. She stared anxiously into his face, running her fingers over his upper arms, his jaw, his scarlet crest. She examined the bruises Practal had left on the side of his head. As soon as she had reassured herself he had come to no harm, she pushed him away.

  “Has my champion been successful in defending my honour?” she asked. When she spoke, lights came on behind the windows, revealing dim blue faces which seemed to repeat quietly whatever she said. “Is the man dead?”

  Immediately Retz saw he had made a mistake. He could have killed Practal, and now he wished he had. He wondered if she had been told already. He knew that whatever he said the courtiers would tell her the truth, but to avoid having to answer the question himself he threw Practal’s mail shirt on the floor at her feet.

  “I bring you his shirt, ma’am,” he said.

  She looked at him expressionlessly. Bubbles went up from the mouths of the faces in the windows. From behind him Retz heard someone say,

  “We are afraid the man is not dead, Your Majesty. Retz fought a lazy match and then hamstrung him by a crude trick. We do not understand why, since his instructions were clear.”

  Retz laughed dangerously.

  “It was not a crude trick,” he said. “It was a clever one. Someday I will find a trick like that for you.”

  Mammy Vooley sat like a heap of sticks, her single eye directed at the ceiling.

  After a moment she seemed to shrug. “It will be enough,” she said remotely. “But in future you must kill them, you must always kill them. I want them killed.” And her mottled hand came out again from under the folds of her robe, where tiny flakes of limewash and damp plaster had settled like the dust in the convoluted leaves of a foreign plant. “Now give me the weapon back until the next time.”

  Retz massaged his ear. The power-knife had left some sort of residue inside his bones, some vibration which made him feel leaden and nauseated. He was afraid of Mammy Vooley and even more afraid of the dead, bluish faces in the windows; he was afraid of the courtiers as they passed to and fro behind him, whispering together. But he had made so many enemies down in the Low City that tonight he must persuade her to let him keep the knife. To gain time he went down on one knee. Then he remembered something he had heard in a popular play, The War with the Great Beetles.

  “Ma’am,” he said urgently, “let me serve you further! To the south and east lie those broad wastes which threaten to swallow up Viriconium. New empires are there to be carved out, new treasures dug up! Only give me this knife, a horse, and a few men, and I will adventure there on your behalf!”

  When tegeus-Cromis, desperate swordsman of The War with the Great Beetles, had petitioned Queen Methvet Nian in this manner, she had sent him promptly (albeit with a wan, prophetic smile) on the journey which was to lead to his defeat of the Iron Dwarf, and thence to the acquisition of immense power. Mammy Vooley only stared into space and whispered, “What are you talking about? All the empires of the world are mine already.”

  For a second Retz forgot his predicament, so real was his desire for that treasure which lies abandoned amid the corrupt marshes and foundering, sloth-haunted cities of the South. The clarity and anguish of his own hallucination had astonished him.

  “Then what will you give me?” he demanded bitterly. “It is not as if I failed you.”

  Mammy Vooley laughed.

  “I will give you Osgerby Practal’s mail shirt,” she said, “since you have spurned the clothes I dressed you in. Now—quickly!—return me the weapon. It is not for you. It is only to defend my honour, as you well know. It must be returned after the combat.”

  Retz embraced Mammy Vooley’s thin, oddly articulated legs and tried to put his head in her lap. He closed his eyes. He felt the courtiers pull him away. Though he kicked out vigorously, they soon stripped him of the meal-coloured cloak—exclaiming in disgust at the whiteness of his body— and found the ceramic sheath strapped under his arm. He thought of what would happen to him when the Locust Clan caught him defenceless somewhere among the ruins at Lowth, or down by the Isle of Dogs, where his mother lived.

  “My lady,” he begged, “lend me the knife. I will need it before dawn—”

  But Mammy Vooley would not speak to him. With a shriek of despair he threw off the courtiers and pulled the knife out. Leprous white motes floated in the cold room. The bones of his arm turned to paste.

  “This is all I ever got from you,” he heard himself say. “And here is how I give it you back, Mammy Vooley!”

  With a quick sweep of the knife he cut off the hand she had raised to dismiss him. She stared at the end of her arm, and then at Retz: her face seemed to be swimming up towards his through dark water, anxious, one-eyed, unable to understand what he had done to her.

  Retz clasped his hands to his head.

  He threw down the weapon, grabbed up his belongings, and—while the courtiers were still milling about in fear and confusion, dabbing numbly at their cloaks where Mammy Vooley’s blood had spattered them—ran moaning out of the palace. Behind him all the dim blue lips in the throne-room windows opened and closed agitatedly, like disturbed pond life.

  Outside on the Proton Way he fell down quivering in the slushy snow and vomited his heart up. He lay there thinking, Two years ago I was nothing; then I became the Queen’s champion and a great fighter; now they will hunt me down and I will be no
thing again. He stayed there for twenty minutes. No one came after him. It was very dark. When he had calmed down and the real despair of his position had revealed itself to him, he put on Osgerby Practal’s clothes and went into the Low City, where he walked about rather aimlessly until he came to a place he knew called the Bistro Californium. He sat there drinking lemon gin until the whistling began and his fear drove him out onto the streets again.

  It was the last hour before dawn, and a binding frost had turned the rutted snow to ice. Retz stepped through an archway in an alley somewhere near Line Mass Quay and found himself in a deep narrow courtyard where the bulging housefronts were held apart by huge balks of timber. The bottom of this crumbling well was bitterly cold and full of a darkness unaffected by day or night; it was littered with broken pottery and other rubbish. Retz shuddered. Three sides of the courtyard had casement windows; the fourth was a blank, soot-streaked cliff studded with rusty iron bolts; high up he could see a small square of moonlit sky. For the time being he had thrown his pursuers off the scent. He had last heard them quartering the streets down by the canal. He assured himself briefly that he was alone and sat down in a doorway to wait for first light. He wrapped his woollen cloak round him.

  A low whistle sounded next to his very ear. He leapt to his feet with a scream of fear and began to beat on the door of the house.

  “Help!” he cried. “Murder!”

  He heard quiet ironic laughter behind him in the dark.

  Affiliates of the Locust Clan had driven him out of the Artists’ Quarter and into Lowth. There on the familiar hill he had recognised with mounting panic the squawks, shrieks, and low plaintive whistles of a dozen other factions, among them Anax Hermax’s High City Mohocks, the Feverfew Anschluss with their preternaturally drawn-out “We are all met,” the Yellow Paper Men, and the Fifth of September—even the haughty mercenaries of the Blue Anemone. They had waited for him, their natural rivalries suppressed. They had made the night sound like the inside of an aviary. Then they had harried him to and fro across Lowth in the sleety cold until his lungs ached, showing themselves only to keep him moving, edging him steadily towards the High City, the palace, and Mammy Vooley. He believed they would not attack him in a private house, or in daylight if he could survive until then.