Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  “All right, come on, you’ve seen enough of this.”

  The Mari reared up for a second, bared its white teeth, then retreated into the shadows, and the boy Ringmer, presumably, with it.

  At the door of the staircase which led to the Yule Greave’s private room I took leave of his wife, in case, as she said, we did not meet again.

  “We see so few people,” she said.

  “Hurry up,” urged the Yule Greave. “It’s quite a climb.”

  The staircase was so narrow that he rubbed his shoulders on the walls as he led the way up, brushing off great flakes of damp yellow plaster. His fat pear-shaped buttocks shut out the light. The little square room was right at the top of the house. From its narrow windows you could see one of the stone avenues stretching away, a sliver of brownish hillside, and a bend in the shallow stony river. The wind boomed around us, bringing quite clearly the bleat of moorland sheep.

  The Yule Greave tried to open a trap door in the ceiling so that we could go out onto the roof, which was flat there. The bolts were rusted shut, but he would give up only after a lot of heaving and grunting.

  “I can’t understand it,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  He hammered at one of the bolts until he cut the heel of his hand, then his eyes watered and he began to cry. He turned away from me and pretended to look out across the hillside, where the sheep were scattered like grey rocks. “If we fail,” he said, “the future will judge us very harshly.” He sniffed and blinked. He looked at his cut hand, then wiped his eyes with it, leaving a smear of blood. “Now look what I’ve done. I’m sorry.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  The tower smelled of the old books he had abandoned to the mould in haphazard piles. I picked up Oei’l Voirrey and The Death and Revival of the Earl of Rone. I asked him if he would show me his souvenirs, but he seemed to have lost interest. He kept them in a wooden chest: a few dolls made out of women’s hair and bits of mirror; some cooking implements; a knife of curious design. The damp had got at everything and made it worthless. “It’s just the sort of thing we all picked up,” he said. “I think there’s a mask in there somewhere.”

  “The men of the community set out in the afternoon,” I quoted, “and, aftermuch parading and searching, discover the Earl of Rone hidden ineffectuallyin the low scrub . . .”

  “You can keep the Oei’l Voirrey if you like,” he said.

  We stared down at the ancient avenue stretching away from the house, its puddled surface reflecting the white sky. His wife appeared walking slowly along it with the boy Ringmer. They were smiling and talking like ghosts. The Yule Greave watched them sadly, until I said that I would have to go.

  “You must at least have something to eat with us,” he said.

  “I have to be in the city before morning,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  We went out, and I got on my horse in one of the muddy gateways. As I set off down the long avenue I thought I heard him say, “Tell them in the city that we still keep faith.”

  The avenue seemed barren and endless. The sun had gone in and it was raining again by the time I led my men through a break in one of the walls; and with the cold wind of spring blowing into our backs we turned north and picked our way up to the rim of the escarpment.

  Up by the Yule Greave’s abandoned quarries I stopped to have one more look at the house. It seemed silent and untenanted. Then I saw a stone cart move slowly down the valley towards the fortifications. Smoke came out of one of the chimneys. Above me the little grey hawk dipped and swerved on the wind. My men, sensing my preoccupation, huddled in a bay of the quarry, wrapped in their sodden cloaks and talking quietly. I could smell moorland, wet wool, the breath of the horses. Soon most of the valley was obscured by mist and driving rain, but I could see the fortifications lying across it in straight lines, and beyond them, towards the sea where a fugitive and watery sun was still shining, the light was reflected off the waiting encampments.

  If I had the eyes of that hawk, I thought, I know what I would see down there, moving towards us.

  One of my men pointed to the fortifications and said,

  “Those walls won’t last long, however well they’re defended.”

  I found myself staring at him for a long time before answering. Then I said:

  “They’ve already been breached. That place down there is raddled.”

  Even as we watched, the Yule Greave and his wife and their three children came out of the house with the boy Ringmer, and began to dance in a circle in the overgrown garden. I could hear the thin voices of the children carrying the tune, blown up the hill with the mist and the rain:

  “What time will the King come home?

  One o’clock in the afternoon.

  What will he have in his hand?

  A bunch of ivy.”

  Behind me someone said, “You’ve dropped your book, sir.”

  “Let it lie.”

  THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE

  THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE

  The city has always been full of little strips and triangles of unused land. A row of buildings falls down in Chenaniaguine—the ground is cleared for further use—elder and nettle spring up—nothing is ever built. Or else the New Men set aside some park for a municipal estate, then quarrel among themselves: a few shallow trenches and low brick courses are covered in a season by couch grass and “fat hen.” Allman’s Heath, bounded on two sides by empty warehouses, an abattoir, and a quarantine hospital, and on its third by a derelict reach of the canal, looks like any of them.

  A few houses stare morosely at it from the city side of the canal. The people who live in them believe that insects the size of horses infest the heath. Nobody has ever seen one; nevertheless, once a year the large wax effigy of a locust, freshly varnished and with a knot of reed grasses in its mouth, is brought out from the houses and paraded up and down the towpath. In the background of this ceremony the heath seems to stretch away forever. It is the same if you go and look from the deserted pens of the cattle market, or one of the windows of the old hospital. To walk round it takes about an hour.

  Every winter years ago, little girls would chalk the ground for “blind Michael” in a courtyard off the Plaza of Realised Time. (It was on the left as you came to the Plain Moon Café, where even in February the tables were arranged on the pavement, their planished copper tops gleaming in the weak sun. You turned down by an ornamental apple tree.) Generally they were the illegitimate children of midinettes, laundry women who worked in Minnet-Saba, or the tradesmen from the Rivelin market. They preserved a fierce independence and wore short stiff blouses which bared the hollow of their backs to the grimmest weather. If you approached them properly, one of them would always tuck her chalk down her white drawers, lick the snot off her upper lip, and lead you to Orves; it was hard work to keep up with her in the steep winding streets.

  Most sightseers changed their minds as soon as they saw the shadow of the observatory falling across the houses, and went back to drink hot genever in the Plain Moon. Those who kept on under the black velvet banners of the New Men, which in those days hung heavily from every second-floor window, would find themselves on the bank of the canal at Allman’s Reach.

  There was not much to see. The cottages were often boarded up at that time of year. A few withered dock plants lined the water’s edge where the towpath had collapsed. No one was in sight. The wind from the heath made your eyes water until you turned away and found the girl standing quite still next to you, her hands hanging at her sides. She would hardly look at you, or the heath; she might glance at her feet. If you offered her money she would scratch her behind, screech with laughter, and run off down the hill. Later you might see her kneeling on the pavement in some other part of the Quarter, the wet chalk in her mouth, staring with a devout expression at something she had drawn.

  Vera Ghillera, Vriko’s immortal ballerina, had herself taken to Allman’s Reach the day she arrived in the city from Sour Bridge. She w
as still a provincial and not more than a child herself, as thin and fierce and naive as any of them in the courtyard off the plaza, but determined to succeed; long in the muscle for classical dance, perhaps, but with a control already formidable and a sharp technical sense. It was the end of a winter afternoon when she got there. She stood away from her guide and looked over the canal. After a minute her eyes narrowed as if she could see something moving a great distance away. “Wait,” she said. “Can you? No. It’s gone.” The sun was red across the ice. Long before the city knew her lyrical port de bras, she knew the city. Long, long before she crossed the canal she had seen Allman’s Heath and acknowledged it.

  Everyone has read how Vera Ghillera, choreographed by Madame Chevigne, costumed by Audsley King, and dancing against sets designed by Paulinus Rack from sketches attributed to Ens Laurin Ashlyme, achieved overnight fame at the Prospekt Theatre as “Lucky Parminta” in The Little Humpbacked Horse; how she was courted by Rack and Ingo Lympany amongst others, but did not marry; and how she kept her place as principal dancer for forty years despite the incurable fugues which compelled her to attend regularly and in secret the asylum at Wergs.

  Less of her early life is public. In her autobiography The Constant Imago, she is not frank about her illness or how it came about. And few of her contemporaries were ever aware of the helplessness of her infatuation with Egon Rhys, leader of the Blue Anemone Ontological Association.

  Rhys was the son of a trader in fruit and vegetables at Rivelin—one of those big, equivocally natured women whose voice or temper dominate the Market Quarter for years on end, and whose absence leaves it muted and empty. He had been in and out of the market since her death, a man enclosed, not much used to the ordinary emotions, not interested in anything but his own life. He tended to act in good faith.

  He was shorter than Vera Ghillera. As a boy, first selling crystallised flowers round the combat rings, then as the apprentice of Osgerby Practal, he had learned to walk with a shambling gait which diverted attention from his natural balance and energy. This he retained. (Later in life, though his limbs thickened, his energy seemed to increase rather than abate—at seventy, they said, he could hardly stand still to talk to you.) He had large hands and a habit of looking at them intently, with a kind of amused indulgence, as if he wanted to see what they would do next.

  His heavy, pleasant face was already well-known about the rings when Vera came to the city. Under the aegis of the Blue Anemone he had killed forty men. As a result the other “mutual” associations often arranged a truce among themselves in order to bring about his death. The Feverfew Anschluss had a special interest in this, as did the Fourth of October and the Fish-Head Men from Austonley. At times even his relations with the Anemone were difficult. He took it calmly, affecting an air of amusement which—as in other notorious bravos—seems to have masked not anxiety but an indifference of which he was rather ashamed, and which in itself sometimes frightened him. He let himself be seen about the Quarter unaccompanied, and walked openly about in the High City, where Vera first observed him from an upper room.

  The Little Humpbacked Horse was history by then: she had carried a lamp in Mariana Natesby, overcome with furious concentration the debilitating danse d’ecole work and formalism of Lympany’s The Ginger Boy. She had danced with de Cuevas, then past the height of his powers, and been his lover; she had had her portrait painted once a year for the oleo-graph trade, as “Delphine,” “Manalas,” and—looking over a parapet or smiling mysteriously under a hat—as the unnamed girl in The Fire Last Wednesday at Lowth. She had got her full growth. At work, though she was so tall, her body seemed compacted, pulled in on itself like the spring of a humane killer: but she looked exhausted when the makeup came off, and somehow underfed as she slumped awkwardly, legs apart, on a low chair in her sweat-stained practice clothes. She had forgotten how to sit. She was “all professional deformity in body and soul.” Her huge eyes gave you their attention until she thought you were looking at someone else, then became blank and tired.

  She never lost her determination, but an unease had come over her.

  In the morning before practice she could be seen in the workmen’s cafés down by the market, huddled and fragile-looking in an expensive woollen coat. She listened to the sad-sounding traders’ calls in the early fog, hearing them as remote, and as urgent as the cries of lookouts in the bows of a ship. “Two fathoms and shelving!” She watched the girls playing blind Michael in the courtyard off the Plaza of Realised Time, but as soon as they recognised her walked quickly away. “One fathom!”

  The first time she saw Egon Rhys she ran down into the street without thinking and found him face to face with two or three members of the Yellow Paper College. It was a fraught moment; razors were already out in the weird Minnet-Saba light, which lay across the paving stones the colour of mercury. Rhys had his back to some iron railings, and a line of blood ran vertically down his jaw from a nick under one eye.

  “Leave that man alone!” she said. At ten years old in the depressed towns of the Midland Levels she had seen unemployed boys fighting quietly under the bridges, building fires on waste ground. “Can’t you find anything better to do?”

  Rhys stared at her in astonishment and jumped over the railings.

  “Don’t ask me who she was,” he said later in the Dryad’s Saddle. “I legged it out of there faster than you could say, right through someone’s front garden. They’re hard fuckers, those Yellow Paper Men.” He touched the cut they had given him. “I think they’ve chipped my cheekbone.”

  He laughed.

  “Don’t ask me anything!”

  But after that, Vera seemed to be everywhere. He had quick glimpses of a white face with heavily made-up eyes among the crowds that filled the Market Quarter at the close of every short winter afternoon. He thought he saw her in the audience at the ring behind the Dryad’s Saddle. (She was blinking in the fumes from the naphtha lamps.) Later she followed him from venue to venue in the city and brought him great bunches of sol d’or whenever he won.

  With the flowerboys she sent her name, and tickets to the Prospekt Theatre. There he was irritated by the orchestra, confused by the constant changes of scene, and embarrassed by the revealing costumes of the dancers. The smell of dust and sweat and the thud of their feet on the stage spoiled the illusion for him: he had always understood dancing to be graceful. When Vera had him brought up to her dressing room afterwards, he found her wearing an old silk practice top rotting away under the arms, and a pair of loose, threadbare woollen stockings out of which someone had cut the feet. “I have to keep my calves warm,” she explained when she caught him staring at them. He was horrified by the negligent way she sprawled, watching him intently in the mirrors, and he thought her face seemed as hard and tired as a man’s; he left as soon as he could.

  Vera went home and stood irresolutely near her bed. The geranium on the windowsill was like an artificial flower on a curved stem, its white petals more or less transparent as the clouds covered and uncovered the moon. She imagined saying to him,

  “You smell of geraniums.”

  She began to buy him the latest novels. Just then, too, a new kind of music was being played everywhere, so she took him to concerts. She commissioned Ens Laurin Ashlyme to paint his portrait. He couldn’t be bothered to read, he said; he listened distractedly to the whine of the cor anglais, then stared over his shoulder all evening as if he had seen someone he knew; he frightened the artist by showing him how good an edge his palette knife would take. “Don’t send so many flowers,” he told her. Nothing she could offer seemed to interest him, not even his own notoriety.

  Then he watched a cynical turn called Insects at the Allotrope Cabaret in Cheminor. One of the props used in this was a large yellow locust. When they first dragged it onto the cramped Allotrope stage it appeared to be a clever waxwork. But soon it moved, and even waved one of its hands, and the audience discovered among the trembling antennae and gauze wings a naked woman, pa
inted with wax, lying on her back with her knees raised to stimulate the bent rear legs of the insect. She wore to represent its head a stylised, highly varnished mask. Fascinated, Rhys leaned forward to get a better view. Vera heard his breath go in with a hiss. He said loudly, “What’s that? What is that animal?” People began to laugh at his enthusiasm; they couldn’t see that the double entendre of the act meant nothing to him. “Does anyone know?” he asked them.

  “Hush!” said Vera. “You’re spoiling it for everyone else.”

  Poor lighting and a smell of stale food made the Allotrope a cheerless place to perform; it was cold. The woman in the insect mask, having first adjusted it on her shoulders so that it would face the audience when she did, stood up and made the best she could of an “expressive” dance, crossing and uncrossing her thick forearms in front of her while her breath steamed into the chilly air and her feet slapped one two three, one two three on the unchalked boards. But Rhys would not leave until the bitter end, when the mask came off and under it was revealed the triumphant smile, disarranged chestnut hair, and tired puffy face of some local artiste hardly sixteen years old, to whistles of delight.

  Outside, their shadows fell huge and black on the wall that runs, covered with peeling political cartoons, the length of Endingall Street. “It doesn’t seem much to stand in front of an audience for,” said Vera, imitating the barren, oppressive little steps. “I would be frightened to go on.” She shuddered sympathetically. “Did you see her poor ankles?”

  Rhys made an impatient gesture.

  “I thought it was very artistic,” he said. Then: “That animal! Do things like that exist anymore?”