Viriconium
Page 53
All the rest of the night her strange long body moved over him in the unsteady illumination from the skylight. The insect mask hung above him like a question, with its huge faceted eyes and its jaws of filigree steel plate. He heard her breath in it, distinctly, and once thought he saw through it parts of her real face, pale lips, a cheekbone, an ordinary human eye: but he would not speak to her. The outer passages of the observatory at Alves are full of an ancient grief. The light falls as if it has been strained through muslin. The air is cold and moves unpredictably. It is the grief of the old machines, which, unfulfilled, whisper suddenly to themselves and are silent again for a century. No one knows what to do with them. No one knows how to assuage them. A faint sour panic seems to cling to them: they laugh as you go past, or extend a curious yellow film of light like a wing.
“Ou lou lou” sounds from these passages almost daily—more or less distant with each current of air—for Mammy Vooley is often here. No one knows why. It is clear that she herself is uncertain. If it is pride in her victory over the Analeptic Kings, why does she sit alone in an alcove, staring out of the windows? The Mammy who comes here to brood is not the doll-like figure which processes the city on Fridays and holidays. She will not wear her wig, or let them make up her face. She is a constant trial to them. She sings quietly and tunelessly to herself, and the plaster falls from the damp ceilings into her lap. A dead mouse has now come to rest there and she will allow no one to remove it.
At the back of the observatory, the hill of Alves continues to rise a little. This knoll of ancient compacted rubbish, excavated into caves, mean dwellings, and cemeteries, is called Antedaraus because it drops away sheer into the Daraus Gorge. Behind it, on the western side of the gorge (which from above can be seen to divide Uroconium like a fissure in a wart), rise the ruinous towers of the Old City. Perhaps a dozen of them still stand, mysterious with spires and fluted mouldings and glazed blue tiles, among the blackened hulks of those that fell during the City Wars. Every few minutes one or another of them sounds a bell, the feathery appeal of which fills the night from the streets below Alves to the shore of the Aqualate Pond, from Montrouge to the arena: in consequence the whole of Uroconium seems silent and tenantless—empty, littered, obscure, a city of worn-out enthusiasms.
Mammy Vooley hasn’t time for those old towers, or for the mountains which rise beyond them to throw a shadow ten miles long across the bleak watersheds and shallow boggy valleys outside the city. It is the decayed terraces of the Antedaraus that preoccupy her. They are overgrown with mutant ivy and stifled whins; along them groups of mourners go, laden with anemones for the graves. Sour earth spills from the burst revetments between the beggars’ houses, full of the rubbish of generations and strewn with dark red petals which give forth a sad odour in the rain. All day long the lines of women pass up and down the hill. They have with them the corpse of a baby in a box covered with flowers; behind them comes a boy dragging a coffin lid; Mammy Vooley nods and smiles.
Everything her subjects do here is of interest to her: on the same evening that Crome found himself outside the observatory—fearfully clutching under his coat the weapon from the waste—she sat in the pervasive gloom somewhere in the corridors, listening with tilted head and lively eyes to a hoarse muted voice calling out from under the Antedaraus. After a few minutes a man came out of a hole in the ground and with a great effort began pulling himself about in the sodden vegetation, dragging behind him a wicker basket of earth and excrement. He had, she saw, no legs. When he was forced to rest, he looked vacantly into the air; the rain fell into his face but he didn’t seem to notice it. He called out again. There was no answer. Eventually he emptied the basket and crawled back into the ground.
“Ah!” whispered Mammy Vooley, and sat forward expectantly.
She was already late; but she waved her attendants away when for the third time they brought her the wig and the wooden crown.
“Was it necessary to come here so publicly?” muttered Crome.
The woman with the insect’s head was silent. When that morning he had asked her, “Where would you go if you could leave this city?” she had answered, “On a ship.” And, when he stared at her, added, “In the night. I would find my father.”
But now she only said,
“Hush. Hush now. You will not be here long.”
A crowd had been gathering all afternoon by the wide steps of the observatory. Ever since Mammy Vooley’s arrival in the city it had been customary for “sides” of young boys to dance on these steps on a certain day in November, in front of the gaunt wooden images of the Analeptic Kings. Everything was ready. Candles thickened the air with the smell of fat. The kings had been brought out, and now loomed inert in the gathering darkness, their immense defaced heads lumpish and threatening. The choir could be heard from inside the observatory, practising and coughing, practising and coughing, under that dull cracked dome which absorbs every echo like felt. The little boys—they were seven or eight years old—huddled together on the seeping stones, pale and grave in their outlandish costumes. They were coughing, too, in the dampness that creeps down every winter from the Antedaraus.
“This weapon is making me ill,” said Crome. “What must I do? Where is she?”
“Hush.”
At last the dancers were allowed to take their places about halfway up the steps, where they stood in a line looking nervously at one another until the music signalled them to begin. The choir was marshalled, and sang its famous “Renunciative” cantos, above which rose the whine of the cor anglais and the thudding of a large flat drum. The little boys revolved slowly in simple, strict figures, with expressions inturned and languid. For every two paces forward, it had been decreed, they must take two back.
Soon Mammy Vooley was pushed into view at the top of the steps, in a chair with four iron wheels. Her head lolled against its curved back. Attendants surrounded her immediately, young men and women in stiff embroidered robes who after a perfunctory bow set about ordering her wisp of hair or arranging her feet on a padded stool. They held a huge book up in front of her single milky eye and then placed in her lap the crown or wreath of woven yew twigs which she would later throw to the dancing boys. Throughout the dance she stared uninterestedly up into the sky, but as soon as it was finished and they had helped her to sit up she proclaimed in a distant yet eager voice:
“Even these were humbled.”
She made them open the book in front of her again, at a different page. She had brought it with her from the North.
“Even these kings were made to bend the knee,” she read.
The crowd cheered.
She was unable after all to throw the wreath, although her hands picked disconnectedly at it for some seconds. In the end it was enough for her to let it slip out of her lap and fall among the boys, who scrambled with solemn faces down the observatory steps after it while her attendants showered them with crystallised geranium petals and other coloured sweets, and in the crowd their parents urged them, “Quick now!”
The rain came on in earnest, putting out some of the candles; the wreath rolled about on the bottom step like a coin set spinning on a table in the Luitpold Café, then toppled over and was still. The quickest boy had claimed it, Mammy Vooley’s head had fallen to one side again, and they were preparing to close the great doors behind her, when shouting and commotion broke out in the observatory itself and a preposterous figure in a yellow satin shirt burst onto the steps near her chair. It was Ansel Verdigris. He had spewed black-currant gin down his chest, and his coxcomb, now dishevelled and lax, was plastered across his sweating forehead like a smear of blood. He still clutched under one arm the painting he had taken from Crome’s room: this he began to wave about in the air above his head with both hands, so strenuously that the frame broke and the canvas flapped loose from it.
“Wait!” he shouted.
The woman with the insect’s head gave a great sideways jump of surprise, like a horse. She stared at Verdigris for a
second as if she didn’t know what to do, then pushed Crome in the back with the flat of her hand.
“Now!” she hissed urgently. “Go and kill her now or it will be too late!”
“What?” said Crome.
As he fumbled at the hilt of the weapon, poison seemed to flow up his arm and into his neck. Whitish motes leaked out of the front of his coat and, stinking of the ashpit, wobbled heavily past his face up into the damp air. The people nearest him moved away sharply, their expressions puzzled and nervous.
“Plotters are abroad,” Ansel Verdigris was shouting, “in this very crowd!”
He looked for some confirmation from the inert figure of Mammy Vooley, but she ignored him and only gazed exhaustedly into space while the rain turned the bread crumbs in her lap to paste. He squealed with terror and threw the painting on the floor.
“People stared at this picture,” he said. He kicked it. “They knelt in front of it. They have dug up an old weapon and wait now to kill the Mammy!”
He sobbed. He caught sight of Crome.
“Him!” he shouted. “There! There!”
“What has he done?” whispered Crome.
He dragged the sword out from under his coat and threw away its sheath. The crowd fell back immediately, some of them gasping and retching at its smell. Crome ran up the steps holding it out awkwardly in front of him, and hit Ansel Verdigris on the head with it. Buzzing dully, it cut down through the front of Verdigris’s skull, then, deflected by the bridge of his nose, skidded off the bony orbit of the eye and hacked into his shoulder. His knees buckled and his arm on that side fell off. He went to pick it up and then changed his mind, glaring angrily at Crome instead and working the glistening white bones of his jaw. “Bugger,” he said. “Ur.” He marched unsteadily about at the top of the steps, laughing and pointing at his own head.
“I wanted this,” he said thickly to the crowd. “It’s just what I wanted!” Eventually he stumbled over the painting, fell down the steps with his remaining arm swinging out loosely, and was still.
Crome turned round and tried to hit Mammy Vooley with the weapon, but he found that it had gone out like a wet firework. Only the ceramic hilt was left—blackened, stinking of fish, giving out a few grey motes which moved around feebly and soon died. When he saw this he was so relieved that he sat down. An enormous tiredness seemed to have settled in the back of his neck. Realising that they were safe, Mammy Vooley’s attendants rushed out of the observatory and dragged him to his feet again. One of the first to reach him was the woman with the insect’s head.
“I suppose I’ll be sent to the arena now,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged.
“The thing seems to be stuck to my hand,” he told her. “Do you know anything about it? How to get it off?”
But it was his hand, he found, that was at fault. It had swollen into a thick clubbed mass the colour of overcooked mutton, in which the hilt of the weapon was now embedded. He could just see part of it protruding. If he shook his arm, waves of numbness came up it; it did no good anyway, he couldn’t let go.
“I hated my rooms,” he said. “But I wish I was back in them now.”
“I was betrayed, too, you know,” she said.
Later, while two women supported her head, Mammy Vooley peered into Crome’s face as if trying to remember where she had seen him before. She was trembling, he noticed, with fear or rage. Her eye was filmed and watery, and a smell of stale food came up out of her lap. He expected her to say something to him but she only looked, and after a short time signed to the women to push her away. “I forgive all my subjects,” she announced to the crowd. “Even this one.” As an afterthought she added, “Good news! Henceforth this city will be called Vira Co, ‘the City in the Waste.’ ” Then she had the choir brought forward. As he was led away Crome heard it strike up “Ou lou lou,” that ancient song:
Ou lou lou lou
Ou lou lou
Ou lou lou lou
Ou lou lou
Ou lou lou lou
Lou Lou lou lou
Ou lou lou lou
Lou
Lou
Lou
Soon the crowd was singing too.
STRANGE GREAT SINS
STRANGE GREAT SINS
“This mite’s sins are nothing to some I’ve had to swallow,” boasted the sin-eater. He was a dark, energetic man of middle height and years, always nodding his head, rubbing his hands, or shifting his weight from one foot to the other, anxious to put the family at their ease. “They’ll taste of vanilla and honey compared to some.”
No one answered him, and he seemed to accept this readily enough— he had, after all, been privy in his life to a great deal of grief. He looked out of the window. The tide was ebbing, and the air was full of fog which had blown in from the sea. All along Henrietta Street, out of courtesy to the bereaved family, the doors and windows were open, the mirrors covered and the fires extinguished. Frost and fog, and the smell of the distant shore: not much to occupy him. The sin-eater breathed into his cupped hands, coughed suddenly, yawned.
“I like a wind that blows off the land myself,” he said.
He went and looked down at the little girl. They had laid her out two hours ago, on a bed with a spotless blue and white cover, and placed on her narrow chest a dish of salt. Gently he tapped with an outstretched finger the rim of this dish, tilting his head to hear the clear small ringing noise which was produced.
“I’ve been in places where they make linen garlands,” he said, “and decorate them with white paper roses. Then they hang white gloves from them, one glove for each year of the kiddy’s age, and keep them in the church until they fall to pieces.” He nodded his head. “That’s how I think of children’s sins,” he said. “White gloves hanging in a church.”
Imagining instead perhaps the narrow cemetery behind the dunes, entered through its curious gateway formed of two huge curved whalebones, imagining perhaps the sea holly, the gulls, and the blowing sand which covers everything, the girl’s mother began to cry. The rest of the family stared helplessly at her. There was another, idiot, daughter who banged her hands on the table and threw a knife into the empty grate. The father, an oldish man who delivered mackerel in a cart along the Fish Road to Eame, Child’s Ercall, and sometimes as far as Sour Bridge, said dully: “She were running about yesterday as happy as you please. She were always running, happy as you please.” He had repeated this every half hour or so since the sin-eater’s arrival, shaking his head as if in his simple pleasure at her happiness he had somehow missed a vital clue which would have enabled him to prevent her death (or at least comprehend it). His wife touched his sleeve, rubbing her eyes and trying to smile.
It was a long vigil, as they always are. Towards morning the sin-eater heard a sound of muffled revelry in the street outside: stifled laughter, the rattle of a tambourine quickly stilled, the scrape of clogs on the damp cobbles. When he looked out he could see several dim figures moving backwards and forwards in the sea fog. He blinked. He narrowed his eyes and cleaned the windowpane with the flat of his hand. Behind him he heard the child’s father get to his feet with a deep sigh. Turning back into the room he said, “They’ve brought the horse over from Shifnal, I think. Unless you’ve got one in the village.”
The old man stared at him, at first without seeming to understand, then with growing anger, while outside they began to sing:
Mari Lwyd
Horse of frost & fire
Horse which is not a horse
Look kindly on our celebration.
The pallid skull of the Mari could now be seen, bobbing up and down on its pole, clacking its lower jaw energetically as the wind opened the fog up into streaming ribbons and tatters, then closed it again, white and seamless like a sheet.
“Let us in and give us some beer,” called a muffled but derisive voice. The idiot daughter gave a smile of delight and stared round the room as if she had heard a cupboard or a table speak
; she tilted her head and whispered. There was a clatter of hooves or clogs, or perhaps it was simply the clapping of hands. The Mari’s followers were dressed in rags. They danced in the fog and frost, their breath itself a fog. The masks they wore were meant to represent the long strange lugubrious head of the wasteland locust, that enormous insect which lives in the blowing sand and clinging mud of the Great Brown Desert.
“I’ll give you more than beer!” shouted the old man, his face congested with his powerful frustration and grief. “I’ll give you something you won’t like!” He pulled the sleeves of his shirt up above his elbows, and before his wife could stop him he had rushed out among the Mari-boys, kicking and punching. They evaded him with deft hops and skips, and ran away laughing into the mist; the idiot daughter murmured and bit her nails; the door banged emptily back and forth in the wind. The old man had to come back into the house, shamefaced and defeated.
“Leave them be,” said his wife. “They’re not worth it, that lot from up at Shifnal.”
Distantly the voices still sang,
Mari Lwyd
Falls between the day and the hour
Horse which is not a horse
Look kindly on our feast.
The sin-eater made himself comfortable by the window again. He scratched his head. Something in the foggy street had stirred his memory. “The horse which is not a horse,” he whispered dreamily.
He smiled.
“Oh, no,” he said to the old man and his wife, “your little girl’s sins will be like the coloured butterflies—compared to some I’ve tasted.” And then again: “The horse which is not a horse. I never hear those words without a shudder. Have you ever been to Viriconium? Packed your belongings aboard some barge at the ruined wharfs of the Yser Canal? Watched two clouds close a slot of blue in the winter sky, so that you felt as if something had been taken from you forever?”