Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  He yawned. Whistling thinly and flapping his arms against his sides to keep warm, he paced to and fro underneath the gibbet. When he stood on the meagre strip of pebbles at its edge, a chill seemed to seep out of the pool and into his bones. Behind him Henrietta Street stretched away, lugubrious and potholed. He promised himself, as he had done several times that night, that if he turned round, and looked down it, and still saw no one, he would go home. Afterwards he could never quite describe to himself what he had seen.

  Fireworks flickered a moment in the dark, like the tremulous reflections made by a bath of water on the walls and ceilings of an empty room, and were gone. While they lasted, Henrietta Street was all boarded-up windows and bluish shadows. He had the impression that as he turned it had just been vacated by a number of energetic figures—quiet, agile men who dodged into dark corners or flung themselves over the rotting fences and iron railings, or simply ran off very fast down the middle of the road preciselyso that he shouldn’t see them. At the same time he saw, or thought he saw, one real figure do all these things, as if it had been left behind by the rest, staring white-faced over its shoulder at him in total silence as it sprinted erratically from one feeble refuge to another, and then vanishing abruptly between some houses.

  Overlaid, as it were, on both this action and the potential or completed action it suggested, was a woman in a brown cloak. At first she was tiny and distant, trudging up Henrietta Street towards him; then, without any transitional state at all, she had appeared in the middle ground, posed like a piece of statuary between the puddles, white and naked with one arm held up (behind her it was possible to glimpse for an instant three other women, but not to see what they were doing—except that they seemed to be plaiting flowers); finally, with appalling suddenness, she filled his whole field of vision, as if on the Unter-Main-Kai a passerby had leapt in front of him without warning and screamed in his face. He gave a violent start and jumped backwards so quickly that he fell over. By the time he was able to get up the sky was dark again, Henrietta Street empty, everything as it had been.

  The woman, though, awaited him silently in the shadows beneath the gibbet, wrapped in her cloak like a sculpture wrapped in brown paper, and wearing over her head a complicated mask made of wafery metal to represent the head of one or another wasteland insect. Crome found that he had bitten his tongue. He approached her cautiously, holding out in front of him at arm’s length the paper Verdigris had given him.

  “Did you send me this?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “No.”

  “What must I do to stop these dreams?”

  She laughed. Echoes fled away over the Aqualate Pond.

  “Kill the Mammy,” she said.

  Crome looked at her.

  “You must be mad,” he said. “Whoever you are.”

  “Wait,” she recommended him, “and we’ll see who’s mad.”

  She lowered the corpse in its wicker cage—the chains and pulleys of the gibbet gave a rusty creak—and pulled it towards her by its feet. Momentarily it escaped her and danced in a circle, coy and sad. She recaptured it with a murmur. “Hush now. Hush.” Crome backed away. “Look,” he whispered, “I—” Before he could say anything else, she had slipped her hand deftly between the osiers and, like a woman gutting fish on a cold Wednesday morning at Lowth, opened the corpse from diaphragm to groin. “Man or woman?” she asked him, up to her elbows in it. “Which would you say?” A filthy smell filled the air and then dissipated. “I don’t want—” said Crome. But she had already turned back to him and was offering him her hands, cupped, in a way that gave him no option but to see what she had found—or made—for him.

  “Look!”

  A dumb, doughy shape writhed and fought against itself on her palms, swelling quickly from the size of a dried pea to that of a newly born dog. It was, he saw, contained by vague and curious lights which came and went; then by a cream-coloured fog which was perhaps only a blurring of its own spatial limits; and at last by a damp membrane, pink and grey, which it burst suddenly by butting and lunging. It was the lamb he had seen in his dreams, shivering and bleating and tottering in its struggle to stand, the eyes fixed on him forever in its complaisant, bone-white face. It seemed already to be sickening in the cold leaden breath of the pond.

  “Kill the Mammy,” said the woman with the insect’s head, “and in a few days’ time you will be free. I will bring you a weapon soon.”

  “All right,” said Crome.

  He turned and ran.

  He heard the lamb bleating after him the length of Henrietta Street, and behind that the sound of the sea, rolling and grinding the great stones in the tide.

  For some days this image preoccupied him. The lamb made its way without fuss into his waking life. Wherever he looked he thought he saw it looking back at him: from an upper window in the Artists’ Quarter, or framed by the dusty iron railings which line the streets there, or from between the chestnut trees in an empty park.

  Isolated in a way he had not been since he first arrived in Uroconium wearing his green plush country waistcoat and yellow pointed shoes, he decided to tell no one what had happened by the Aqualate Pond. Then he thought he would tell Ansel Verdigris and Ingo Lympany. But Lympany had gone to Cladich to escape his creditors—and Verdigris, who after eating the tablecloth was no longer welcomed at the Luitpold Café, had left the Quarter too: at the large old house in Delpine Square there was only his mother—a bit lonely in her bath chair, though still a striking woman with a great curved nose and a faint, heady smell of elder blossom—who said vaguely, “I’m sure I can remember what he said,” but in the end could not.

  “I wonder if you know, Ardwick Crome, how I worry about his bowels,” she went on. “As his friend you must worry, too, for they are very lazy, and he will not encourage them if we do not!”

  It was, she said, a family failing.

  She offered Crome chamomile tea, which he refused, and then got him to run an errand for her to a fashionable chemist’s in Mynned. After that he could do nothing but go home and wait.

  Kristodulos Fleece—half dead with opium and syphilis, and notoriously self-critical—had left behind him when he vacated the north-light studio a small picture. Traditionally it remained there. Succeeding occupants had taken heart from its technical brio and uncustomary good humour (although Audsley King was reputed to have turned it to the wall during her brief period in Montrouge because she detected in it some unforgivable sentimentality or other) and no dealer in the Quarter would buy it for fear of bad luck. Crome now removed it to the corner above the cheap tin washstand so that he could see it from his bed.

  Oil on canvas, about a foot square, it depicted in some detail a scene the artist had called “Children beloved of the gods have the power to weep roses.” The children, mainly girls, were seen dancing under an elder tree, the leafless branches of which had been decorated with strips of rag. Behind them stretched away rough common land, with clumps of gorse and a few bare, graceful birch saplings, to where the upper windows and thatch of a low cottage could be made out. The lighthearted vigour of the dancers, who were winding themselves round the tallest girl in a spiral like a clock spring, was contrasted with the stillness of the late-winter afternoon, its sharp clear airs and horizontal light. Crome had often watched this dance as a boy, though he had never been allowed to take part in it. He remembered the tranquil shadows on the grass, the chant, the rose and green colours of the sky. As soon as the dancers had wound the spiral tight, they would begin to tread on one another’s toes, laughing and shrieking— or, changing to a different tune, jump up and down beneath the tree while one of them shouted, “A bundle of rags!”

  It was perhaps as sentimental a picture as Audsley King had claimed. But Crome, who saw a lamb in every corner, had never seen one there; and when she came as she had promised, the woman with the insect’s head found him gazing so quietly up at it from the trapezium of moonlight falling a
cross his bed that he looked like the effigy on a tomb. She stood in the doorway, perhaps thinking he had died and escaped her.

  “I can’t undo myself,” he said.

  The mask glittered faintly. Did he hear her breathing beneath it? Before he could make up his mind there was a scuffling on the stairs behind her and she turned to say something he couldn’t quite catch—though it might have been: “Don’t come in yourself.”

  “These straps are so old,” he explained. “My father—”

  “All right, give it to me, then,” she said impatiently to whoever was outside. “Now go away.” And she shut the door. Footsteps went down the stairs; it was so quiet in Montrouge that you could hear them clearly going away down flight after flight, scraping in the dust on a landing, catching in the cracked linoleum. The street door opened and closed. She waited, leaning against the door, until they had gone off down the empty pavements towards Mynned and the Ghibbeline Passage, then said, “I had better untie you.” But instead she walked over to the end of Crome’s bed, and sitting on it with her back to him stared thoughtfully at the picture of the elder-tree dance.

  “You were clever to find this,” she told him. She stood up again, and, peering at it, ignored him when he said,

  “It was in the other room when I came.”

  “I suppose someone helped you,” she said. “Well, it won’t matter.” Suddenly she demanded, “Do you like it here among the rats? Why must you live here?”

  He was puzzled.

  “I don’t know.”

  A shout went up in the distance, long and whispering like a deeply drawn breath. Roman candles sailed up into the night one after the other, exploding in the east below the zenith so that the collapsing pantile roofs of Montrouge stood out sharp and black. Light poured in, ran off the back of the chair and along the belly of the enamel jug, and, discovering a book or a box here, a broken pencil there, threw them into merciless relief. Yellow or gold, ruby, greenish-white: with each new pulse the angles of the room grew more equivocal.

  “Oh, it is the stadium!” cried the woman with the insect’s head. “They have begun early tonight!”

  She laughed and clapped her hands. Crome stared at her.

  “Clowns will be capering in the great light!” she said.

  Quickly she undid his straps.

  “Look!”

  Propped up against the whitewashed wall by the door she had left a long brown paper parcel hastily tied with string. Fat or grease had escaped from it, and it looked as if it might contain a fish. While she fetched it for him, Crome sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, rubbing his face. She carried it hieratically, across her outstretched arms, her image advancing and receding in the intermittent light.

  “I want you to see clearly what we are going to lend you.”

  When the fireworks had stopped at last, an ancient white ceramic sheath came out of the paper. It was about two feet long, and it had been in the ground for a long time, yellowing to the colour of ivory and collecting a craquelure of fine lines like an old sink. Chemicals seeping through the soils of the Great Waste had left here and there on it faint blue stains. The weapon it contained had a matching hilt—although by now it was a much darker colour from years of handling—and from the juncture of the two had leaked some greenish, jelly-like substance which the woman with the insect’s head was careful not to touch. She knelt on the bare floorboards at Crome’s feet, her back and shoulders curved round the weapon, and slowly pulled hilt and sheath apart.

  At once a smell filled the room, thick and stale like wet ashes in a dustbin. Pallid oval motes of light, some the size of a birch leaf, others hardly visible, drifted up towards the ceiling. They congregated in corners and did not disperse, while the weapon, buzzing torpidly, drew a dull violet line after it in the gloom as the woman with the insect’s head moved it slowly to and fro in front of her. She seemed to be fascinated by it. Like all those things it had been dug up out of some pit. It had come to the city through the Analeptic Kings, how long ago no one knew. Crome pulled his legs up onto the bed out of its way.

  “I don’t want that,” he said.

  “Take it!”

  “No.”

  “You don’t understand. She is trying to change the name of the city!”

  “I don’t want it. I don’t care.”

  “Take it. Touch it. It’s yours now.”

  “No!”

  “Very well,” she said quietly. “But don’t imagine the painting will help you again.” She threw it on the bed near him. “Look at it,” she said. She laughed disgustedly. “ ‘Children beloved of the gods’!” she said. “Is that why he waited for them outside the washhouses twice a week?”

  The dance was much as it had been, but now with the fading light the dancers had removed themselves to the garden of the cottage, where they seemed frozen and awkward, as if they could only imitate the gaiety they had previously felt. They were dancing in the shadow of the bredogue, which someone had thrust out of an open window beneath the earth-coloured eaves. In Soubridge, and in the midlands generally, they make this pitiful thing—with its bottle-glass eyes and crepe-paper harness—out of the stripped and varnished skull of a horse, put up on a pole covered with an ordinary sheet. This one, though, had the skull of a well-grown lamb, which seemed to move as Crome looked.

  “What have you done?” he whispered. “Where is the picture as it used to be?”

  The lamb gaped its lower jaw slackly over the unsuspecting children to vomit on them its bad luck. Then, clothed with flesh again, it turned its white and pleading face on Crome, who groaned and threw the painting across the room and held out his hand.

  “Give me the sword from under the ground, then,” he said.

  When the hilt of it touched his hand he felt a faint sickly shock. The bones of his arm turned to jelly and the rank smell of ashpits enfolded him. It was the smell of a continent of wet cinders, buzzing with huge papery-winged flies under a poisonous brown sky; the smell of Cheminor, and Mammy Vooley, and the Aqualate Pond; it was the smell of the endless wastes which surround Uroconium and everything else that is left of the world. The woman with the insect’s head looked at him with satisfaction. A knock came at the door.

  “Go away!” she shouted. “You will ruin everything!”

  “I’m to see that he’s touched it,” said a muffled voice. “I’m to make sure of that before I go back.”

  She shrugged impatiently and opened the door.

  “Be quick then,” she said.

  In came Ansel Verdigris, stinking of lemon genever and wearing an extraordinary yellow satin shirt which made his face look like a corpse’s. His coxcomb, freshly dyed that afternoon at some barber’s in the Tinmarket, stuck up from his scalp in exotic scarlet spikes and feathers. Ignoring Crome, and giving the woman with the insect’s head only the briefest of placatory nods, he made a great show of looking for the weapon. He sniffed the air. He picked up the discarded sheath and sniffed that. (He licked his finger and went to touch the stuff that had leaked from it, but at the last moment he changed his mind.) He stared up at the vagrant motes of light in the corners of the room, as if he could divine something from the way they wobbled and bobbed against the ceiling.

  When he came to the bed he looked intently but with no sign of recognition into Crome’s face.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “He’s touched it all right.”

  He laughed. He tapped the side of his nose, and winked. Then he ran round and round the room crowing like a cock, his mouth gaping open and his tongue extended, until he fell over Kristodulos Fleece’s painting, which lay against the skirtingboard where Crome had flung it. “Oh, he’s touched it all right,” he said, leaning exhaustedly against the door frame. He held the picture away from him at arm’s length and looked at it with his head on one side. “Anyone could see that.” His expression became pensive. “Anyone.”

  “The sword is in his hand,” said the woman with the insect’s head. “If you can t
ell us only what we see already, get out.”

  “It isn’t you that wants to know,” Verdigris answered flatly, as if he was thinking of something else. He propped the painting up against his thigh and passed the fingers of both hands several times rapidly through his hair. All at once he went and stood in the middle of the room on one leg, from which position he grinned at her insolently and began to sing in a thin musical treble like a boy at a feast:

  “I choose you one, I choose you all,

  I pray I might go to the ball.”

  “Get out!” she shouted.

  “The ball is mine,” sang Verdigris,

  “and none of yours,

  Go to the woods and gather flowers.

  Cats and kittens abide within

  But we court ladies walk out and in!”

  Some innuendo in the last line seemed to enrage her. She clenched her fists and brought them up to the sides of the mask, the feathery antennae of which quivered and trembled like a wasp’s.

  “Sting me!” taunted Verdigris. “Go on!”

  She shuddered.

  He tucked the painting under his arm and prepared to leave.

  “Wait!” begged Crome, who had watched them with growing puzzlement and horror. “Verdigris, you must know that it is me! Why aren’t you saying anything? What’s happening?”

  Verdigris, already in the doorway, turned round and gazed at Crome for a moment with an expression almost benign, then, curling his upper lip, he mimicked contemptuously, “ ‘Verdigris, you’ve never been to Cheminor. Neither of us has.’ ” He spat on the floor and touched the phlegm he had produced with his toe, eyeing it with qualified disapproval. “Well, I have now, Crome. I have now.” Crome saw that under their film of triumph his eyes were full of fear; his footsteps echoed down into the street and off into the ringing spaces of Montrouge and the Old City.

  “Give the weapon to me,” said the woman with the insect’s head. As she put it back in its sheath it gave out briefly the smells of rust, decaying horse hair, vegetable water. She seemed indecisive. “He won’t come back,” she said once. “I promise.” But Crome would not look away from the wall. She went here and there in the room, blowing dust off a pile of books and reading a line or two in one of them, opening the door into the north-light studio and closing it again immediately, tapping her fingers on the edge of the washstand. “I’m sorry about the painting,” she said. Crome could think of nothing to say to that. The floorboards creaked; the bed moved. When he opened his eyes she was lying next to him.