Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  “I left Viriconium after that,” he told her, “for the deserts in the North; and I never went back there.” He moved his shoulders suddenly, irritated perhaps because he could no longer make these events clear enough to impress her, and he was impatient with himself for continuing to speak. “Do I miss it? No: nor Sour Bridge, with its dull farmers treading mud in the shuttered drawing rooms.”

  Frost, fog, the smell of the distant shore; dawn creeping down Henrietta Street like milk. He could hear the people raking up their fires, uncovering the mirrors and birdcages. They rubbed their hands briskly as they looked out at the morning. “If the wind changes later we shall have a fine day.” At last they could shut the doors and get a bit of warmth! The little dead girl lay safely on the blue and white cover; it remained only for someone to eat the salt.

  “One thing is odd, though,” he said. “When I sat in my uncle’s rooms and looked back over the decisions which had led me there, I saw clearly that at every turn they had been made by the dying and the dead; and I swore I would leave all that behind me.”

  He stared for a moment almost pleadingly at the woman.

  “As you see, I have not.”

  She smiled: her child was safe; its soul was secure; she was content.

  “That was where I first ate the salt,” he said bleakly. “It lay on her breast as surely as it lies now on your dead daughter’s. I don’t know why my uncle put it there for me to find.”

  Later in the morning a wind from the land got up and blew light dashes of rain across the windows, but they were soon gone, and it was a fine day. Full of potatoes and fish, tired perhaps but comfortably settled in the stomach, the sin-eater picked up his bag and swung it over his shoulder. He had taken his money and put it in his pocket. Behind him at the trestle tables in the street he could hear laughter, the clatter of plates, the beginnings of music. He breathed deeply, shrugged, made a gesture with his hands, all at once, as if to convey to himself his own sense of freedom.

  He was not after all that boy from Sour Bridge, or his Uncle Prinsep. A stocky, energetic man of middle height, he whistled off down Henrietta Street, ready to walk as far as he could. He looked inland, at the hills looming through squalls of rain. Soon he would climb up among them and let the wind blow those clean, childish little sins out of him and away.

  LORDS OF MISRULE

  LORDS OF MISRULE

  “Aid from the city is our only hope now,” the Yule Greave said, looking away over the empty moorland and rough grazing seamed with tree-filled cloughs.

  He was a tall man, fortyish, with weak blue eyes and a straggle of thin blond hair, who breathed laboriously through his mouth. Under the old queen, who had given him the house and the pasture that went with it, he had been known as a fighter. Every so often he would look around him as if surprised to find himself where he was, and his lower lip trembled if he talked about the city.

  To give him time to catch his breath I stopped and looked back down at his house. It was built on a curious pattern like an ideogram from one of the old languages, ramified, peculiar. Much of it now lay abandoned and overgrown in a tangle of elder and hawthorn and ivy. Flung out from it were four great stone avenues, each a mile long. I wondered who had built them, and when. It seemed a pointless act out here.

  “I’ve been forced to grub up pavements,” he said. “Knock down a wall here and there. But you can see what it was like.”

  There were deep muddy furrows in the gateways where the stone carts went in and out. The wind came in gusts from the south and west, bringing a rainy smell and the distant bleat of sheep. The dwarf oaks on the slopes above us shifted their branches uneasily and sent down a few more of last winter’s brownish withered leaves. One of the little grey kestrels of the moorland launched itself from some rocks above us, planing downwind with its wingtips ragged against the racing white clouds; it hovered for a moment, then veered off and dropped like a stone onto something in the bracken below.

  “Look!” I said.

  The Yule Greave stood wiping his face and nodding vaguely.

  “To tell you the truth,” he said, “we never thought they would come this far. We expected you to stop them before this.”

  I breathed in the smell of the bracken. “This is such a beautiful valley,” I said.

  “You’ll be able to see the whole of it soon,” the Yule Greave said. He started up the slope where it steepened for its final climb to the rim of the escarpment, following a soft, peaty sheep-trod through the bracken. He placed one foot carefully and heavily in front of the other, grunting at the steeper places. “I’m sorry to bring you all this way,” he said. “I don’t expect you’re used to this sort of thing.”

  “I’m not tired,” I said.

  If I had been cold, he hardly noticed. He laughed unoffendedly.

  “They’ll want a report from you,” he said. “Up here it’s easier to appreciate the scale of the problem. As a military man you’ll want to be able to judge for yourself, and not rely on the ideas of an old cutthroat.”

  We climbed the last few yards to the little outcrop, and at the top, when I turned, the spring sun had come out briefly; I could feel it like a poultice down the side of my jaw. Sweat poured down the Yule Greave’s forehead and into his eyes. He put one hand against the rock to steady himself.

  “They quarried this to build the house,” he said. “A long time ago.”

  The rock was pale, coarse-textured, full of little quartz pebbles. Higher up in the quarried bays hung mats of ivy.

  “Now you can see what I mean,” he said.

  I was more interested in his house, which lay like a metaphor in the wide flat valley. It was a light fawn colour. Its four vast avenues of stone thrust out from it across the old alluvial bench, black, black. What it meant I had no idea. It was one of those places where the past speaks to us in a language so completely of its own we have no hope of understanding. Puddles of water in the worn paving reflected the sky; I could see the gaps in the walls, like bites, where the Yule Greave had taken stone for the fortifications, a line of hasty revetments and trenches stretching across the valley lower down, where it sloped away to the south.

  “Incredible,” I said.

  He pointed south, past the fortifications.

  “There were dozens of places like this once,” he said, “all the way down to the sea. They’re overrun now.”

  He made an angry, miserable gesture.

  “If the city won’t help, why are we bothering? We don’t build out here anymore: we only pull it down.”

  “I’m not sure I agree,” I said.

  I was tempted to ask him why, if he didn’t want to destroy the old walls, he didn’t reopen the quarry and use fresh stone, but his face was now full of a kind of savage self-hatred and self-pity, and he said,

  “What’s the point of discussing it?”

  A retired bravo knows nothing about building. The city had made him what he was. Perhaps he knew it.

  “You’ve heard it all before, I expect. Anyway you can see how close they’ve come. They’ll be across the river and over the fortifications in a month, less if we don’t get help. See: there, and there? You can see the sun glinting on their camps.”

  “Will you show me the house before I go?” I asked.

  He looked at me in surprise. He was pleased to be asked, I thought, but he said, “Oh, the inside’s a ruin now. We do our best, but it’s all dust and mice.”

  He seemed reluctant to go down the hill now he had got up it. He watched the little grey hawk hovering and stooping, hovering and stooping, as it worked its way up and down the slopes of sun-warmed bracken. He took a last look at the great stone symbol which filled the valley and which he had lived in for twenty years without understanding, then began to descend slowly. New shoots, he observed, were beginning to appear green and delicately curled between the ruined bracken stems. The turf, flattened and bleached by the previous month’s snow, was springing up again.

  “That air!” h
e exclaimed, breathing ecstatically a gust of wind which brought the scent of may blossom up from the valley. Then he stopped suddenly and said:

  “What’s it like in the city these days?”

  I shrugged.

  “We have similar problems to yours,” I heard myself tell him, “but not so extreme. Otherwise it is very beautiful. New buildings are springing up everywhere. The horse chestnuts are in blossom along the Margarethestrasse and in the Plaza of Unrealised Time.”

  I did not mention the torn political cartoons flapping from the rusty iron railings, or the Animal Mask Societies with their public rituals and increasingly unreasonable demands. But he was remembering a different city anyway—

  “I suppose the place is still full of clerks and shopkeepers?” he said. “And those wonderful tarts who overcharge you in the Rue Ouled Nail?”

  He laughed.

  “We’ll always look to Uroconium,” he said sentimentally, and quoted, “ ‘Queen of the Empire, jewel on the beach of the Western Sea.’ ”

  The walls that surrounded the house had already warmed to the weak sunshine, trapping a fraction of its heat to give up to the elder and ivy in the overgrown gardens. Two or three hawthorns filled the air with the scent of the may, which in that confined space seemed drugged and dangerous. Insects murmured in the little orchard and among the fruit bushes which had long ago run to bramble in the shelter of the walls. Above the garden rose the honey-coloured stone of the main building, covered in creeper and bright yellow lichens. The wind blustered round its complicated roofs.

  Inside the house he had someone bring out a bottle of lemon genever, and invited me to have some.

  “Foul stuff, but the best we can get out here.”

  We drank silently for a while. The Yule Greave seemed to sink into himself, into his own sense of abandonment and futility. “Dust and mice,” he said, staring round in disgust at the high gloomy walls and the silent, massive, oppressive old furniture, “dust and rats. This is the only room we ever light a fire in.” Later he began to talk about the old queen’s reign. It was the common story of infighting at court and violence in the city. He had known, or said he had, Sibylle, Axonby, and even Sten Reventlow. Many of the actions in which he had taken part struck me as being little more than outrages, committed by people hardly able to help themselves, whose philosophy was that their blood was a book. He kept his souvenirs of these “little wars” in one of the upper rooms, he said. There was some peculiar stuff among it all, stuff that made you think. We could go and look at it later if I was interested.

  “I’d like that if there’s time,” I said.

  “Oh, there’ll be time,” he said. “It’s mostly clothes, weapons, stuff we picked up in their houses. You wouldn’t credit the hanks of hair, the filthy pictures they were always looking at.”

  He asked if I had done any fighting in the city, and I said that I hadn’t. There was a silence, then he went on musingly: “The women were the worst. They would hide in doorways, and reach out for your face or your neck as you walked past. Hide themselves in doorways. They’d have bits of glass embedded in a cake of soap, do you see, and slash out at your neck or your eyes.” He looked at me as if he were wondering how much more he could tell me. “Can you believe that? Women who would slash your eyes?” He shook his head. “I hated going up the stairs in those places. The lamps would all be out. You never knew what would be in a cupboard. A woman or a child, screaming at you. Or else they’d show you something foul, obscene, and laugh. The old queen would never bear them near her, not at any price.”

  “So I have heard,” I said. “It is less of a problem now.”

  He chuckled.

  “Old men like me cleared it up for you,” he said. “We can be proud of that. I was with the Feverfew Anschluss until Antic Horn’s entryists broke it up.”

  A little later his wife came in. By this time he had drunk most of the bottle. He stared at her with a kind of muddled resentment.

  She was a tall woman, though not perhaps as tall as him, very thin and ethereal, dressed in a fashion long out of date in the city. She seemed not quite real to me, like a picture of my mother in a darkened room. I guessed she had been one of the old queen’s women-in-waiting, given to him like the house and the valley in return for his loyalty in the backstreets and tavern brawls. Her hair, an astonishing orange colour, was worn long and crimped, to emphasise the height of her cheekbones, the whiteness of her skin, and the odd, concave curve of her features.

  Over one arm she was carrying a piece of heavily embroidered cloth which I recognised as being part of the “mast horse” ceremony: it would be used to hide the operator of the animal’s snapping jaw. I had never seen such an elaborate cloth in use. When I mentioned this she smiled and said:

  “You’ll have to ask Ringmer if you want to know more about this one. He was born near here, and his father worked the horse at All Hallows.”

  “Ringmer’s father was a half-wit,” said the Yule Greave, yawning and pouring himself more lemon gin.

  She ignored him. “Lord Cromis, are you young men at all interested in such things in the city now?” she asked me. Her eyes were green. She had unfolded the cloth to show me a complex pattern of leaf-like shapes.

  “Some are,” I said.

  “Because I’ve filled a whole gallery with them. Ringmer—”

  “Have they shifted the rubble in the south avenue?” the Yule Greave broke in suddenly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It was important to get that rubble moved today,” the Yule Greave said. “I want it as infill further down the valley. We’ve got mud up to our ears down there: I told Ringmer this morning.”

  “Nobody told me that’s what they were supposed to be doing,” she said.

  The Yule Greave muttered something I couldn’t quite catch and emptied his glass quickly. He got up and stared out at the ruined raspberry canes and lichen-covered apple boughs in the garden. This left his wife and me marooned at the other end of the room with only the embroidered cloth in common. A few transparent blue and orange flames stirred round the unseasoned logs in the hearth.

  “Ringmer will show you the rest of the horse,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re interested.”

  She folded the fabric up again, her long thin hands white in the shadows. “Sometimes I feel like wearing it myself,” she laughed, holding it up against her shoulders. “It’s so glorious!” I had a brief vision of her as she must have been in the days of the old queen’s court—waxy and still in a stiff, grey, heavily embossed garment down to her feet, like a flower in a steel vase. Then the Yule Greave came and stood between us to tip into his glass whatever dregs remained in the brown stone bottle. He was walking heavily up some private hill again.

  “Don’t you want to look at the stuff I was telling you about?” he said.

  “I shouldn’t stay more than a few minutes,” I answered. “My men will be waiting for me—”

  “But you’ve only just arrived!”

  “We have to be back in Uroconium by tomorrow morning.”

  “He wants to see the horse, whatever else,” the Yule Greave’s wife insisted.

  “Oh, does he? You’d better go and show him, then,” he said, looking at me as if I had let him down and then turning abruptly away. He poked so hard at the fire that one of the logs fell out of it. Smoke came into the room in a thick cloud. “This stinking chimney!” he shouted.

  We left the room, the Yule Greave looking after us red-faced and watery-eyed. Her gallery, I found out, was a mezzanine floor somewhere in the west wing. The sun was just coming round to it, pouring obliquely in through the tall lanceolate windows. The Yule Greave’s wife stood in an intermittent pool of warm yellow light with her hands clasped anxiously.

  “Ringmer?” she called. “Ringmer?”

  We stood and listened to the wind blustering about outside.

  After a moment a boy of twenty or so came out of the shadows of the mezzanine. He looked surprised to see
her. He had the thick legs and shoulders of the moorland people, and the characteristic soft brown hair chopped off to a line above his raw-looking ears. He was carrying a horse’s head on a pole.

  “I see you have the rest of the Mari,” she said with a smile. “Do you think you could show Lord Cromis? I’ve brought the coat back with me.”

  It was an astonishing specimen. Usually you find the skull boiled and crudely varnished, or buried for a year to get rid of the flesh, a makeshift wire hinge for the jaw, and the bottoms of cheap green bottles for eyes. This one had been made long ago, and with more care: it was lacquered black, its jaw hinged with massive silver rivets, and somehow the inside of a pomegranate had been preserved and inserted, half in each orbit, so that the seeds made bulging, faceted eyes. It must have been appallingly heavy for the operator. The pole on which it rested was brown bone, three and a half feet long and polished with use.

  “It is very striking,” I said.

  The boy now took the embroidered cloth and shook it out. Hooks fitted along its top edge allowed it to be gathered beneath the horse’s head so that it fell in stiff folds and obscured the pole. With a quick, agile movement he slipped under it and crouched down. The Mari came to life, humpbacked, curvetting, and snapping its jaw. It predated not only the Yule Greave but his house. Time opened like a hole underneath us, and the Yule Greave’s wife stepped back suddenly.

  “ ‘Open the door for us,’ ” chanted the boy:

  “ ‘It is cold outside for the Grey Mare

  Its heels are almost frozen.’ ”

  “I would admit you at my peril,” I said. The Yule Greave’s wife laughed.

  Later I went to examine some manuscripts which belonged to the house. They were kept at the other end of the mezzanine. When I looked back the Yule Greave’s wife was standing next to the mast horse. Its eyes glittered, its lower jaw hung down. Her hand was resting on its back, just as it might rest on the neck of a real animal, and she was saying something to it in a low voice. I never found out what, because at that moment the Yule Greave came puffing and panting into the gallery, limping as if he had banged his leg and shouting,