Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  “Help!” he shouted. “Please help!”

  Suddenly one of the casements above him flew open and a head appeared, cocked alertly to one side. Retz waved his arms. “Murder!” The window slammed shut again. He moaned and battered harder at the door while behind him the piercing whistles of the Yellow Paper Men filled the courtyard. When he looked up, the timber balks were swarming with figures silhouetted against the sky. They wanted him out of the yard and into the city again. Someone plucked at his shoulder, whispering. When he struck out, whoever was there cut him lightly across the back of the hand. A moment later the door opened and he fell through it into a dimly lit hall where an old man in a deep blue robe waited for him with a candle.

  At the top of some stairs behind the heavy baize curtain at the end of the hall there was a large room with a stone floor and plastered white walls, kept above the freezing point by a pan of glowing charcoal. It was furnished with heavy wooden chairs, a sideboard of great age, and a lectern in the shape of an eagle whose outspread wings supported an old book. Along one wall hung a tapestry, ragged and out of keeping with the rest of the room, which was that of an abbot, a judge, or a retired soldier. The old man made Retz sit in one of the chairs and held the candle up so that he could examine Retz’s scarlet crest, which he had evidently mistaken for the result of a head wound.

  After a moment he sighed impatiently.

  “Just so,” he said.

  “Sir,” said Retz, squinting up at him, “are you a doctor?” And, “Sir, you are holding the candle so that I cannot see you.”

  This was not quite true. If he moved his head he could make out an emaciated yellow face, long and intelligent-looking, the thin skin stretched over the bones like waxed paper over a lamp.

  “So I am,” said the old man. “Are you hungry?” Without waiting for an answer he went to the window and looked out. “Well, you have outwitted the other wolves and will live another day. Wait here.” And he left the room.

  Retz passed his hands wearily over his eyes. His nausea abated, the sweat dried in the hollow of his back, the whistles of the Yellow Paper Men moved off east towards the canal and eventually died away. After a few minutes he got up and warmed himself over the charcoal pan, spreading his fingers over it like a fan, then rubbing the palms of his hands together mechanically while he stared at the lectern in the middle of the room. It was made of good steel, and he wondered how much it might fetch in the pawnshops of the Margarethestrasse. His breath steamed in the cold air. Who was the old man? His furniture was expensive. When he comes back, Retz thought, I will ask him for his protection. Perhaps he will give me the eagle so that I can buy a horse and leave the city. An old man like him could easily afford that. Retz examined the porcelain plates on the sideboard. He stared at the tapestry. Large parts of it were so decayed he could not understand what they were meant to show, but in one corner he could make out a hill and the steep path which wound up it between stones and the roots of old trees. It made him feel uncomfortable and lonely.

  When the old man returned he was carrying a tray with a pie and some bread on it. Two or three cats followed him into the room, looking up at him expectantly in the brown, wavering light of the candle. He found Retz in front of the tapestry.

  “Come away from there!” he said sharply.

  “Sir,” said Retz, bowing low, “you saved my life. Tell me how I can serve you.”

  “I would not want a murderer for a servant,” replied the old man.

  Retz bit his underlip angrily. He turned his back, sat down, and began to stuff bread into his mouth. “If you lived out there you would act like me!” he said indistinctly. “What else is there?”

  “I have lived in this city for more years than I can remember,” said the old man. “I have murdered no one.”

  At this there was a longish silence. The old man sat with his chin on his chest and appeared lost in thought. The charcoal pan ticked as it cooled. A draught caught the tapestry so that it billowed like a torn curtain in the Boulevard Aussman. The cats scratched about furtively in the shadows behind the chairs. Ignace Retz ate, drank, wiped his mouth; he ate more and wiped his mouth again. When he was sure the old man wasn’t watching him he boldly appraised the steel eagle. Once, on the pretext of going to the window, he even got up and touched it.

  “What horror we are all faced with daily!” exclaimed the old man suddenly.

  He sighed.

  “I have heard the café philosophers say: ‘The world is so old that the substance of reality no longer knows quite what it ought to be. The original template is hopelessly blurred. History repeats over and again this one city and a few frightful events—not rigidly, but in a shadowy, tentative fashion, as if it understands nothing else but would like to learn.’ ”

  “The world is the world,” said Ignace Retz. “Whatever they say.”

  “Look at the tapestry,” said the old man.

  Retz looked.

  The design he had made out earlier, with its mountain path and stunted yew trees, was more extensive then he had thought. In it a bald man was depicted trudging up the path. Above him in the air hung a large bird. Beyond that, more mountains and valleys went away to the horizon. No stitching could be seen. The whole was worked very carefully and realistically, so that Retz felt he was looking through a window. The man on the path had skin of a yellowish colour, and his cloak was blue. He leaned on his staff as if he was out of breath. Without warning he turned round and stared out of the tapestry at Retz. As he did so the tapestry rippled in a cold draught, giving off a damp smell, and the whole scene vanished.

  Retz began to tremble. In the distance he heard the old man say, “There is no need to be frightened.”

  “It’s alive,” Retz whispered. “Mammy Vooley—” But before he could say what he meant, another scene had presented itself.

  It was dawn in Viriconium. The sky was a bowl of cloud with a litharge stain at its edge. Rain fell on the Proton Way where, supported by a hundred pillars of black stone, it spiralled up towards the palace. Halfway along this bleak ancient sweep of road, two or three figures in glowing scarlet armour stood watching a man fight with a vulture made of metal. The man’s face was terribly cut; blood and rain made a dark mantle on his shoulders as he knelt there on the road. But he was winning. Soon he rose tiredly to his feet and threw the bird down in front of the watchers, who turned away and would not acknowledge him. He stared out of the tapestry. His cheeks hung open where the bird had pecked him; he was old and grey-haired, and his eyes were full of regret. His lips moved and he disappeared.

  “It was me!” cried Ignace Retz. “Was it me?”

  “There have been many Viriconiums,” said the old man. “Watch the tapestry.”

  Two men with rusty swords stumbled across a high moor. A long way behind them came a dwarf wearing mechanical iron stilts. His head was laid open with a wound. They waited for him to catch up, but he fell behind again almost immediately. He blundered into a rowan tree and went off in the wrong direction. One of the men, who looked like Ignace Retz, had a dead bird swinging from his belt. He stared dispiritedly out of the tapestry at the real Retz, took the bird in one hand, and raised it high in the air by its neck. As he made this gesture the dwarf passed in front of him, his stilts leaking unhealthy white gases. They forded a stream together, and all three of them vanished into the distance where a city waited on a hill.

  After that men fought one another in the shadow of a cliff, while above them on the eroded skyline patrolled huge iridescent beetles. A fever-stricken explorer with despairing eyes sat in a cart and allowed himself to be pulled along slowly by an animal like a tall white sloth until they came to the edge of a pool in a flooded city. Lizards circled endlessly a pile of corpses in the desert.

  Eventually Retz grew used to seeing himself at the centre of these events, although he was sometimes surprised by the way he looked. But the last scene was too much for him.

  He seemed to be looking through a tall arched win
dow, around the stone mullions of which twined the stems of an ornamental rose. The thorns and flowers of the rose framed a room where curtains of silver light drifted like rain between enigmatic columns. The floor of the room was made of cinnabar crystal and in the centre of it had been set a simple throne. Standing by the throne, two albino lions couchant at her feet, was a slender woman in a velvet gown. Her eyes were a deep, sympathetic violet colour, her hair the russet of autumn leaves. On her long fingers she wore ten identical rings, and before her stood a knight whose glowing scarlet armour was partly covered by a black and silver cloak. His head was bowed. His hands were white. At his side he wore a steel sword.

  Retz heard the woman say clearly, “I give you these things, Lord tegeus-Cromis, because I trust you. I would even give you a power-knife if I had one. Go to the South and win great treasure for us all.”

  Out of the tapestry drifted the scent of roses on a warm evening. There was the gentle sound of falling water, and somewhere a single line of melody repeated over and over again on a stringed instrument. The knight in the scarlet armour took his queen’s hand and kissed it. He turned to look out of the window and wave as if someone he knew was passing. His black hair was parted in the middle to frame the transfigured face of Ignace Retz. Behind him the queen was smiling. The whole scene vanished, leaving a smell of damp, and all that could be seen through the rents in the cloth was the plaster on the wall.

  Ignace Retz rubbed his eyes furiously. He jumped up, pulled the old man out of his chair, clutched him by the upper arm, and dragged him up to the tapestry.

  “Those last things!” he demanded. “Have they really happened?”

  “All queens are not Mammy Vooley,” said the old man, as if he had won an argument. “All knights are not Ignace Retz. They have happened, or will.”

  “Make it show me again.”

  “I am only its caretaker. I cannot compel it.”

  Retz pushed him away with such violence that he fell against the sideboard and knocked the tray off it. The cats ran excitedly about, picking up pieces of food in their mouths.

  “I mustn’t believe this!” cried Retz.

  He pulled the tapestry off the wall and examined it intently, as if he hoped to see himself moving there. When it remained mere cloth he threw it on the floor and kicked it.

  “How could I live my life if I believed this?” he asked himself.

  He turned back to the old man, took him by the shoulders, and shook him.

  “What did you want to show me this for? How can I be content with this ghastly city now?”

  “You need not live as you do,” said the old man. “We make the world we live in.”

  Retz threw him aside. He hit his head on the sideboard, gave a curious angry groan, and was still. He did not seem to be dead. For some minutes Retz lurched distractedly to and fro between the window and the wall where the tapestry had been, repeating, “How can I live? How can I live!” Then he rushed over to the lectern and tried to wrench the steel eagle off it. It would be daylight by now, out in the city; they would be coughing and warming their hands by the naphtha flares in the Tinmarket. He would have a few hours in which to sell the bird, get a horse and a knife, and leave before the bravos began hunting him again. He would go out of the Haunted Gate on his horse, and go south, and never see the place again.

  The bird moved. At first he thought it was simply coming loose from the plinth of black wood on which it was set. Then he felt a sharp pain in the palm of his left hand, and when he looked down the thing was alive and struggling powerfully in his grip. It cocked its head, stared up at him out of a cold, violent eye. It got one wing free, then the other, and redoubled its efforts. He managed to hold on to it for a second or two longer, then, crying out in revulsion and panic, he let go and staggered back, shaking his lacerated hands. He fell over something on the floor and found himself staring into the old man’s stunned china-blue eyes.

  “Get out of my house!” shouted the old man. “I’ve had enough of you!”

  The bird meanwhile rose triumphantly into the air and flapped round the room, battering its wings against the walls and shrieking, while coppery reflections flared off its plumage and the cats crouched terrified underneath the furniture.

  “Help me!” appealed Retz. “The eagle is alive!”

  But the old man, lying on the floor as if paralysed, set his lips and would only answer,

  “You have brought it on yourself.”

  Retz stood up and tried to cross the room to the door at the head of the stairs. The bird, which had been obsessively attacking its own shadow on the wall, promptly fastened itself over his face, striking at his eyes and tearing with its talons at his neck and upper chest. He screamed. He pulled it off him and dashed it against the base of the wall, where it fluttered about in a disoriented fashion for a moment before making off after one of the cats. Retz watched it, appalled, then clapped his hands to his bleeding face and blundered out of the room, down the narrow staircase, and out into the courtyard again. He slammed the door behind him.

  It was still dark.

  Sitting on the doorstep, Retz felt his neck cautiously to determine the extent of his injuries. He shuddered. They were not shallow. Above him he could still hear the trapped bird shrieking and beating its wings. If it escaped it would find him. As soon as he had stopped bleeding he backed shakily away across the courtyard and passed through the arch into a place he did not know.

  He was on a wide, open avenue flanked by ruined buildings and heaps of rubble. Meaningless trenches had been dug across it here and there, and desultory fires burned on every side. Dust covered the broken chestnut trees and uprooted railings. Although there was no sign at all of dawn, the sky somehow managed to throw a curious filmy light over everything. Behind him the walled courtyard now stood on its own like a kind of blank rectangular tower. He thought he was still looking at the old man’s tapestry; he thought there might have been some sort of war in the night with Mammy Vooley’s devastating weapons; he didn’t know what to think. He started to walk nervously in the direction of the canal, then run. He ran for a long time but could not find it. Acres of shattered roof tiles made a musical scraping sound under his feet. If he looked back he could still see the tower; but it got smaller and smaller, and in the end he forgot where to look for it.

  All through that long night he had no idea where he was, but he felt as if he must be on a high plateau, windy and covered completely with the dust and rubble of this unfamiliar city. The wind stung the wounds the bird had given him. The dust pattered and rained against the fallen walls. Once he heard some kind of music coming from a distant house—the febrile beating of a large flat drum, the reedy fitful whine of something like a clarinet—but when he approached the place it was silent again, and he became frightened and ran off.

  Later a human voice from the ruins quite near him made a long drawn-out ou lou lou lou, and was answered immediately from far off by a howl like a dog’s. He fled from it between the long mounds of rubble, and for a while hid in the gutted shell of a cathedral-like building. After he had been there for about an hour, several indistinct figures appeared outside and began to dig silently and energetically in the road. Suddenly, though, they were disturbed; they all looked up together at something Retz couldn’t see, and ran off with their spades. While this was going on he heard feet scraping around him in the dark. There was a deep sigh. Ou lou lou sounded, shockingly close, and he was alone again. They had examined him, whoever they were, and found him uninteresting.

  Towards the dawn he left the building to look at the trench they had dug in the road. It was shallow, abortive, already filling up with grey sand. About a mile away he found a dead man hidden by a corner of masonry that stood a little over waist high.

  Retz knelt down and studied him curiously.

  He lay as if he had fallen while running away from someone, his limbs all askew and one arm evidently broken. He was heavily built, dressed in a loose white shirt and black moles
kin trousers tied up below the knees with red string. He had on a fish-head mask, a thing like a salmon with blubbery lips, lugubrious popping eyes, and a crest of stiff spines, worn in such a way that if he had been standing upright the fish would have been staring glassily into the sky. Green ribbons were tied round his upper arms to flutter and rustle in the wind. Beside him where he had dropped it lay a power-knife from which there rose, as it burned its way into the rubble, a steady stream of poisonous yellow motes.

  They had taken off his boots. His naked white feet were decorated with blue tattoos which went this way and that like veins.

  Retz stared down at him. He climbed onto the wall and looked thoughtfully both ways along the empty road. Whatever place the old man and the bird had consigned him to, it would have its Mammy Vooley. Ten minutes later he emerged from behind the wall dressed in the dead man’s clothes. They were too large, and he had some trouble with the fish head, which stank inside, but he had tied on the red string and the ribbons, and he had the knife. By the time he finished all this, dawn had come at last, a lid of brownish cloud lifted back at its eastern rim on streaks of yellow and emerald green, revealing a steep hill he had not previously seen. It was topped with towers, old fortifications, and the copper domes of ancient observatories. Retz set off in the direction the trench-diggers had taken. SHROGGS ROYD, announced the plaques at the corners of the demolished street: OULED NAIL. Then: RUE SEPILE.

  That afternoon there was a dry storm. Particles of dust flew about under a leaden sky.

  THE LUCK IN THE HEAD