Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  Vera laughed.

  “Go on Allman’s Heath and see for yourself. Isn’t that where you’re supposed to go to see them? What would you do if you were face to face with it now? A thing as big as that?”

  He caught her hands to stop her from dancing. “I’d kill it,” he said seriously. “I’d—” What he might do he had to think for a moment, staring into Vera’s face. She stood dead still. “Perhaps it would kill me,” he said wonderingly. “I never thought. I never thought things like that might really exist.” He was shivering with excitement: she could feel it through his hands. She looked down at him. He was as thick-necked and excitable as a little pony. All of a sudden she was sharply aware of his life, which had somehow assembled for itself like a lot of eccentric furniture the long perspective of Endingall Street, the open doors of the Allotrope Cabaret, that helpless danseuse with her overblocked shoes and ruined ankles, to what end he couldn’t see.

  “Nothing could kill you,” she said shyly.

  Rhys shrugged and turned away.

  For a week or two after that she seemed to be able to forget him. The weather turned wet and mild; the ordinary vigour of their lives kept them apart.

  His relations with the Blue Anemone had never been more equivocal: factions were out for him in High City and Low. If Vera had known he was so hard put to it in the alleys and waste ground around Chenaniaguine and Lowth, who can say what she might have done. Luckily, while he ran for it with an open razor in one hand and a bunch of dirty bandages coming unravelled from the other, she was at the barre ten hours a day for her technique. Lympany had a new production, Whole Air: it would be a new kind of ballet, he believed. Everyone was excited by the idea, but it would mean technique, technique, technique. “The surface is dead!” he urged his dancers: “Surface is only the visible part of technique!”

  Ever since she came up from the midlands, Vera had hated rest days. At the end of them she was left sleepless and irritated in her skin, and as she lay in bed the city sent granular smoky fingers in through her skylight, unsettling her and luring her out so that late at night she had to go to the arena and, hollow-eyed, watch the clowns. There while thinking about something else she remembered Rhys again, so completely and suddenly that he went across her—snap—like a crack in glass. Above the arena the air was purple with roman candles bursting, and by their urgent intermittent light she saw him quite clearly standing in Endingall Street, shivering in the grip of his own enthusiasm, driven yet balked by it like all nervous animals. She also remembered the locust of the Allotrope Cabaret. She thought,

  “Artistic!”

  Though on a good night you could still hear the breathy whisper of twenty-five thousand voices wash across the pantile roofs of Montrouge like a kind of invisible firework, the arena by then was really little more than a great big outdoor circus, and all the old burnings and quarterings had given place to acrobatics, horse racing, trapeze acts, etc. The New Men liked exotic animals. They did not seem to execute their political opponents—or each other—in public, though some of the aerial acts looked like murder. Every night there was a big, stupid lizard or a megatherium brought in to blink harmlessly and even a bit sadly up at the crowd until they had convinced themselves of its rapacity. And there were more fireworks than ever: to a blast of maroons full of magnesium and a broad falling curtain of cerium rain, the clowns would erupt bounding and cartwheeling into the circular sandy space—jumping up, falling down, building unsteady pyramids, standing nine or ten high on one another’s shoulders, active and erratic as grasshoppers in the sun. They fought, with rubber knives and whitewash. They wore huge shoes. Vera loved them.

  The greatest clown of his day, called by the crowd “Kiss-O-Suck,” was a dwarf of whose real name no one was sure. Some people knew him as “Morgante,” others as “Rotgob” or “The Grand Pan.” His legs were frail looking and twisted, but he was a fierce gymnast, often able to perform four separate somersaults in the air before landing bent-kneed, feet planted wide apart, rock steady in the black sand. He would alternate cartwheels with handsprings at such a speed he seemed to be two dwarfs, while the crowd egged him on with whistles and cheers. He always ended his act by reciting verses he had made up himself:

  Codpoorlie—tah

  Codpoorrrlie—tah!

  Codpoorlie—tah! tah! tah!

  Dog pit.

  Dog pit pooley

  Dog pit pooley

  Dog pit have-a-rat

  tah tah tah

  (ta ta.)

  For a time his vogue was so great he became a celebrity on the Unter-Main-Kai, where he drank with the intellectuals and minor princes in the Bistro Californium, strutted up and down in a padded doublet of red velvet with long scalloped sleeves, and had himself painted as “The Lord of Misrule.” He bought a large house in Montrouge.

  He had come originally from the hot bone-white hinterlands of the Mingulay Littoral, where the caravans seem to float like yellow birdcages at midday across the violet lakes of the mirage “while inside them women consult feverishly their grubby packs of cards.” If you are born in that desert, its inhabitants often boast, you know all deserts. Kiss-O-Suck was not born a dwarf but chose it as his career, having himself confined for many years in the black oak box, the gloottokoma, so as to stunt his growth. Now he was at the peak of his powers. When he motioned peremptorily, the other clowns sprang up into the air around him. His voice echoed to Vera over the arena. “Dog pit pooley!” he chanted, and the crowd gave it him back: but Vera, still somehow on Endingall Street with Egon Rhys trembling beside her, heard, “Born in a desert, knows all deserts!” The next day she sent him her name with a great bunch of anemones. I admire your act. They met in secret in Montrouge.

  At the Bistro Californium, Ansel Verdigris, poet of the city, lay with his head sideways on the table; a smell of lemon gin rose from the tablecloth bunched up under his cheek. Some way away from him sat the Marquis de M——, pretending to write a letter. They had quarrelled earlier, ostensibly about the signifier and the signified, and then Verdigris had tried to eat his glass. At that time of night everyone else was at the arena. Without them the Californium was only a few chairs and tables someone had arranged for no good reason under the famous frescoes. De M—— would have gone to the arena himself, but it was cold outside with small flakes of snow falling through the lights on the Unter-Main-Kai. Discovering this about itself, he wrote, the place seems stunned and quiet. It has no inner resources .

  Egon Rhys came in with Vera, who was saying:

  “—was sure he could be here.”

  She pulled her coat anxiously about her. Rhys made her sit where it was warm. “I’m tired tonight,” she said. “Aren’t you?” As she crossed the threshold she had looked up and seen a child’s face smile obliquely out at her from a grimy patch in the frescoes. “I’m tired.” All day long, she complained, it had been the port de bras: Lympany wanted something different—something that had never been done before. “ ‘A new kind of port de bras’!” she mimicked, “ ‘A whole new way of dancing’! But I have to be so careful in the cold. You can hurt yourself if you work too hard in weather like this.”

  She would drink only tea, which at the Californium is always served in wide china cups as thin and transparent as a baby’s ear. When she had had some, she sat back with a laugh. “I feel better now!”

  “He’s late,” said Rhys.

  Vera took his arm and pressed her cheek briefly against his shoulder.

  “You’re so warm! When you were young did you ever touch a cat or a dog just to feel how warm it was? I did. I used to think: It’s alive! It’s alive!”

  When he didn’t respond she added, “In two or three days’ time you could have exactly what you want. Don’t be impatient.”

  “It’s already midnight.”

  She let his arm go.

  “He was so sure he would be here. We lose nothing if we wait.”

  There things rested. Fifteen minutes passed, perhaps half an hour; de M�
��—, certain now that Verdigris was only pretending to be asleep to taunt him, crumpled a sheet of paper suddenly and dropped it on the floor. At this Rhys, whose affairs had made him nervous, jumped to his feet. The Marquis’s mouth dropped open weakly. When nothing else happened Rhys sat down again. He thought, After all, I’m as safe here as anyone else in the city. He was still wary, though, of the poet, whom he thought he recognised. Vera glanced once or twice at the frescoes (they were old; no one could agree on what was represented), then quickly down at her cup. All this time Kiss-O-Suck the dwarf had been sitting slumped on a corner of the mantelpiece behind them like a great doll someone had put there for effect years before.

  His legs dangled. He wore red tights, and yellow shoes with a bell on each toe; his doublet was made of some thick black stuff quilted like a leather shin guard and sewn all over with tiny glass mirrors. Immobility was as acceptable to him as motion: in repose his body would remember the gloottokoma and the hours he had spent there, while his face took on the look of varnished papier-mâché, shiny but as if dust had settled in the lines down the side of his hooked nose down to his mouth, which was set in a strange but extraordinarily sweet smile.

  He had been watching Vera since she came in. When she repeated eventually, “He was so sure he could be here,” he whispered to himself: “I was! Oh, I was!” A moment later he jumped down off the mantelpiece and blew lightly in Egon Rhys’s ear.

  Rhys threw himself across the room, smashing into the tables as he tried to get at his razor which he kept tucked up the sleeve of his coat. He fetched up against the Marquis de M—— and screamed, “Get out of the fucking way!” But the Marquis could only stare and tremble, so they rocked together for a moment, breathing into one another’s faces, until another table went over. Rhys, who was beginning to have no idea where he was, knocked de M—— down and stood over him. “Don’t kill me,” said de M——. The razor, Rhys found, was tangled up with the silk lining of his sleeve: in the end he got two fingers into the seam and ripped the whole lot down from the elbow so that the weapon tumbled out already open, flickering in the light. Up went Rhys’s arm, with the razor swinging at the end of it, high in the air.

  “Stop!” shouted Vera. “Stop that!”

  Rhys stared about him in confusion; blinked. By now he was trembling, too. When he saw the dwarf laughing at him he realised what had happened. He let the Marquis go. “I’m sorry,” he said absentmindedly. He went over to where Kiss-O-Suck had planted himself rock steady on his bent legs in the middle of the floor, and caught hold of his wrist.

  “What if I cut your face for that?” he asked, stroking the dwarf’s cheek as if to calm him down. “Here. Or say here. What if I did that?”

  The dwarf seemed to consider it. Suddenly his little wrist slipped and wriggled in Rhys’s grip like a fish; however hard Rhys held on, it only twisted and wriggled harder, until he had let go of it almost without knowing. (All night after that his fingers tingled as if they had been rubbed with sand.)

  “I don’t think she would like that,” said Kiss-O-Suck. “She wouldn’t like you to cut someone as small as me.”

  He shrieked; slapped Rhys’s face; jumped backwards from where he stood, without so much as a twitch of intent, right over the table and into the hearth. Out of his doublet he brought a small jam jar which he put down in the centre of the table. It contained half a dozen grasshoppers, a grey colour, with yellowish legs. At first they were immobile, but the firelight dancing on the glass around them seemed to invigorate them, and after a moment or two they started to hop about in the jar at random.

  “Look!” said the dwarf.

  “Aren’t they lively?” cried Vera.

  She smiled with delight. The dwarf chuckled. They were so pleased with themselves that eventually Egon Rhys was forced to laugh too. He tucked his razor back up his sleeve and stuffed the lining in after it as best he could. Thereafter strips of red silk hung down round his wrist, and he sometimes held the seam together with his fingers. “You must be careful with that,” said Vera. When she tapped the side of their jar, one or two of the grasshoppers seemed to stare at her seriously for a moment, their enigmatic, horsey little heads quite still, before they renewed their efforts to get out, popping and ticking against the lid.

  “I love them!” she said, which made Egon Rhys look sidelong at the dwarf and laugh even louder. “I love them! Don’t you?”

  The Marquis watched incredulously. He got himself to his feet and with a look at Ansel Verdigris as if to say “This is all your fault” ran out onto the Unter-Main-Kai. A little later Rhys, Vera, and the dwarf followed. They were still laughing; Vera and Rhys were arm in arm. As they went out into the night, Verdigris, who really had been asleep, woke up.

  “Fuck off, then,” he sneered. His dreams had been confused.

  The day they crossed the canal they were followed all the way up to Allman’s Reach from the Plain Moon Café. The mutual associations were out: it was another truce. Rhys could distinguish the whistles of the Fish-Head Men, January the Twelfth, the Yellow Paper College (now openly calling itself a “schism” of the Anemone and publishing its own broad-sheet from the back room of a pie shop behind Red Hart Lane). This time, he was afraid, the Anemone was out too. He had no credit anywhere. At Orves he made the dwarf watch one side of the road while he watched the other. “Pay most attention to doorways.” Faces appeared briefly in the cobbled mouths of alleys. Vera Ghillera shivered and pulled the hood of her cloak round her face.

  “Don’t speak,” warned Egon Rhys.

  He had a second razor with him, one which he no longer used much. That morning he had thought, It’s old but it will do, and taken it down off the dusty windowsill where it lay—its handle as yellow as bone—between a ring of his mother’s and a glass of cloudy water through which the light seemed to come suddenly when he picked it up.

  Though he was careful to walk with his hands turned in to the sides of his body in such a way as to provoke no one, he had all the way up the hill a curious repeating image of himself as somebody who had already run mad with the two razors—hurtling after his enemies across the icy treacherous setts while they stumbled into dark corners or flung themselves over rotting fences, sprinting from one feeble refuge to another. “I’ll pen them up,” he planned, “in the observatory. They won’t stop me now. Those bastards from Austonley . . .” It was almost as if he had done it. He seemed to be watching himself from somewhere behind his own back; he could hear himself yelling as he went for them, a winter gleam at the end of each wildly swinging arm.

  “We’ll see what happens then,” he said aloud, and the dwarf glanced up at him in surprise. “We’ll see what happens then.” But the observatory came and went and nothing happened at all.

  By then some of the Austonley men were no longer bothering to hide, swaggering along instead with broad grins. Other factions soon fell in with them, until they formed a loose, companionable half circle ten or fifteen yards back along the steep street. Their breath mingled in the cold air, and after a few minutes there was even some laughter and conversation between the different parties. As soon as they saw he was listening to them they came right up to Rhys’s heels, watching his hands warily and nudging each other. The Yellow Paper kept itself apart from this: there was no sign of the Anemone at all. Otherwise it was like a holiday.

  Someone touched his shoulder and, stepping deftly away in the same movement, asked him in a soft voice hardly older than a boy’s, “Still got that old ivory bugger of Osgerby’s up your sleeve, Egon? That old slasher of Osgerby Practal’s?”

  “Still got her there, have you?” repeated someone else.

  “Let’s have a look at her, Egon.”

  Rhys shrugged with fear and contempt.

  It was bitterly cold on the canal bank. Vera stood listening to the rush of the broken weir a hundred yards up the reach. Sprays of scarlet rose hips hung over the water like necklaces tossed into the frozen air; a wren was bobbing and dipping among the dry
reeds and withered dock plants beneath them.

  “I can’t see what such a little thing would find to eat,” she said. “Can you?” No one answered.

  The sound of the weir echoed off the boarded-up housefronts. Men from a dozen splinter groups and minor factions now filled the end of the lane to Orves, sealing it off. More were arriving all the time. They scraped heavily to and fro on the cinder path, avoiding the icy puddles, blowing into their cupped hands for warmth, giving Rhys quick shy looks as if to say, “We’re going to have you this time.” Some were sent to block the towpath. Presently the representatives of the Blue Anemone Ontological Association came out of one of the houses, where they had spent the morning playing black-and-red in a single flat ray of light which slanted between the boards and fell on a wooden chair. They had some trouble with the door.

  Rhys brandished his razors at them.

  “Where’s the sense in this? Orcer Pust’s a month dead; I put Ingarden down there with him not four nights ago—where was the sense in that?”

  Sense was not at issue, they said.

  “How many of you will I get before you get me?”

  The representatives of the Anemone shrugged. It was all one to them.

  “Come on, then! Come on!” Rhys shouted to the bravos in the lane. “I can see some bastards I know over there. How would they like it? In the eyes? In the neck? Facedown in the bathhouse tank with Orcer Pust?”

  Kiss-O-Suck the dwarf sat down suddenly and unlaced his boots. When he had rolled his voluminous black trousers up as far as they would go he made a comical face and stepped into the canal, which submerged him to the thighs. He then waded out a few yards, turned round, and said quietly to Rhys, “As far as they’re concerned you’re as good as dead already.” Further out, where it was deeper, probing gingerly in the mud with his toes, he added, “You’re as good as dead on Allman’s Heath.” He slipped: swayed for a moment: waved his arms. “Oops.” Shivering and blowing he climbed out onto the other side and began to rub his legs vigorously. “Foo. That’s cold. Foo. Tah.” He called, “Why should they fight when they’ve only to make sure you go across?”