Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  Rhys stared at him, then at the men from the Anemone. “You were none of you anything until I pulled you out of the gutter,” he told them. He ran his hands through his hair.

  When it was Vera’s turn, the water was so cold she thought it would stop her heart.

  Elder grew in thickets on the edge of the heath as if some attempt at habitation had been made a long time ago. Immediately you got in among it, Vriko began to seem quiet and distant; the rush of the weir died away. There were low mounds overgrown with nettle and matted couch grass; great brittle white-brown stems of cow parsley followed the line of a foundation or a wall; here and there a hole had been scraped by the dogs that swam over in the night from the city—bits of broken porcelain lay revealed in the soft black soil. Where brambles had colonised the open ground, water could be heard beneath them, trickling away from the canal down narrow aimless runnels and trenches.

  It was hard for the dwarf to force his way through this stuff, and after about half an hour he fell on his back in a short rectangular pit like an empty cistern, from which he stared up sightlessly for a moment with arms and legs rigid in some sort of paralytic fit. “Get me out,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “Pull me out.”

  Later he admitted to Vera:

  “When I was a boy in the gloottokoma I would sometimes wake in the dark not knowing if it was night or day, or where I was, or what period of my life I was in. I could have been a baby in an unlit caravan. Or had I already become Kiss-O-Suck, Morgante, ‘the Grand Little Man with the crowd in the palm of his hand’? It was impossible to tell: my ambitions were so clear to me, my disorientation so complete.”

  “I could never get enough to eat,” said Vera. “Until I was ten years old I ate and ate.”

  The dwarf looked at her whitely for a moment.

  “Anyway, that was how it felt,” he said, “to live in a box. What a blaze of light when you were able to open the lid!”

  Elder soon gave way to stands of emaciated birch in a region of shallow valleys and long spurs between which the streams ran in beds of honey-coloured stone as even as formal paving; a few oaks grew in sheltered positions among boulders the size of houses on an old alluvial bench. “It seems so empty!” said Vera. The dwarf laughed. “In the South they would call this the ‘plaza,’ ” he boasted.

  “If they knew about it they’d come here for their holidays.” But after a mile or so of rising ground they reached the edge of a plateau, heavily dissected into a fringe of peaty gullies each with steep black sides above a trickle of orange water. Stones like bits of tile littered the watershed, sorted into curious polygonal arrays by the frost. There was no respite from the wind that blew across it. And though when you looked back you could still see Vriko, it seemed to be fifteen or twenty miles away, a handful of spires tiny and indistinct under a setting sun.

  “This is more like it,” said Kiss-O-Suck.

  Egon Rhys blundered across the entangled grain of the watershed, one peat hag to the next, until it brought him to a standstill. The very inconclusiveness of his encounter with his rivals, perhaps, had exhausted him. He showed no interest in his surroundings, but whenever she would let him he leaned on Vera’s arm, describing to her as if she had never been there the Allotrope Cabaret—how pretty its little danseuse had been, how artistically she had danced, how well she had counterfeited an animal he had never imagined could exist. “I was amazed!” he kept saying. Every so often he stood still and looked down at his clothes as though he wondered how they had got dirty. “At least try and help yourself,” said Vera, who thought he was ill.

  The moment it got dark he was asleep; but he must have heard Kiss-O-SUCK talking in the night because he woke up and said,

  “In the market when my mother was alive it was always, ‘Run and fetch a box of sugared anemones. Run, Egon, and fetch it now.’ ” Just when he seemed to have gone back to sleep again, his mouth hanging open and his head on one side, he began repeating with a kind of infantile resentment and melancholy, “ ‘Run and fetch it now! Run and fetch it now! Run and fetch it now!’ ”

  He laughed.

  In the morning, when he opened his eyes and saw he was on Allman’s Heath, he remembered none of this. “Look!” he said, pulling Vera to her feet. “Just look at it!” He was already quivering with excitement.

  “Did you ever feel the wind so cold?”

  A cindery plain stretched level and uninterrupted to the horizon, smelling faintly of the rubbish pit on a wet day. The light that came and went across it was like the light falling through rainwater in empty tins, and the city could no longer be seen, even in the distance. To start with it was loose uncompacted stuff, ploughed up at every step to reveal just beneath the surface millions of bits of small rusty machinery like the insides of clocks; but soon it became as hard and grey as the sky, so that Vera could hardly tell where cinders left off and air began.

  Rhys strode along energetically. He made the dwarf tell him about the other deserts he had visited. How big were they? What animals had he seen there? He would listen for a minute or two to the dwarf’s answers, then say with satisfaction, “None of those places were as cold as this, I expect,” or: “You get an albino sloth in the South, I’ve heard.” Then, stopping to pick up what looked like a very long thin spring, coiled on itself with such brittle delicacy it must have been the remains of some terrific but fragile dragonfly: “What do you think of this, as a sign? I mean, from your experience?” The dwarf, who had not slept well, was silent.

  “I could go on walking forever!” Rhys exclaimed, throwing the spring into the air. But later he seemed to tire again, and he complained that they had walked all day for nothing. He looked intently at the dwarf.

  “How do you explain that?”

  “What I care about,” the dwarf said, “is having a piss.” He walked off a little way and gasping with satisfaction sent a thick yellow stream into the ground. “Foo!” Afterwards he poked the cinders with his foot and said, “It takes it up, this stuff. Look at that. You could water it all day and never tell. Hallo, I think I can see something growing there already! Dwarfs are more fertile than ordinary people.” (That night he sat awake again, slumped sideways, his arms wrapped round his tucked-up knees, watching Vera Ghillera with an unidentifiable expression on his face. When he happened to look beyond her, or feel the wind on his back, he shuddered and closed his eyes.)

  “When I first saw you,” Vera told Egon Rhys, “you had cut your cheek. Do you remember? A line of blood ran down, and at the end of it I could see one perfect drop ready to fall.”

  “That excited you, did it?”

  She stared at him.

  He turned away in annoyance and studied the heath. They had been on it now for perhaps three, perhaps four days. He had welcomed the effort, and gone to sleep worn out; he had woken up optimistic and been disappointed. Nothing was moving. The dwarf did not seem to be able to give him a clear idea of what to look for. He had thought sometimes that he could see something out of the corner of his eye, but this was only a kind of rapid, persistent fibrillating movement, never so much an insect as its ghost or preliminary illusion. Though at first it had aggravated him, now that it was wearing off he wished it would come back.

  “My knee was damaged practising to dance Fyokla in The Battenberg Cake. That was chain after chain of the hardest steps Lympany could devise; they left your calves like blocks of wood. It hurt to run down all those stairs to help you.”

  “Help me!” jeered Rhys.

  “I’m the locust that brought you here,” she said suddenly.

  She stood back on the hard cinders. One two three, one two three, she mimicked the poverty-stricken skips and hops which pass for dance at the Allotrope Cabaret, the pain and lassitude of the dancer who performs them. Her feet made a faint dry scraping sound.

  “I’m the locust you came to see. After all, it’s as much as she could do.”

  Rhys looked alertly from Vera to the dwarf. Ribbons of frayed red silk fluttered from
his sleeve in the wind.

  “I meant a real insect,” he said. “You knew that before we started.”

  “We haven’t been lucky,” Kiss-O-Suck agreed.

  When Rhys took hold of his wrist he stood as still and compliant as a small animal and added, “Perhaps we came at the wrong time of year.”

  Something had gone out of him: Rhys gazed down into his lined face as if he was trying to recognise what. Then he pushed the dwarf tenderly onto the cinders and knelt over him. He touched each polished cheek, then ran his fingertips in bemusement down the sides of the jaw. He seemed to be about to say something: instead he flicked the razor into his hand with a quick snaky motion so that light shot off the hollow curve of the blade. The dwarf watched it; he nodded. “I’ve never been in a desert in my life,” he admitted. “I made that up for Vera. It sounded more exotic.”

  He considered this. “Yet how could I refuse her anything? She’s the greatest dancer in the world.”

  “You were the greatest clown,” Rhys said.

  He laid the flat of the razor delicately against the dwarf’s cheekbone, just under the eye, where there were faint veins in a net beneath the skin.

  “I believed all that.”

  Kiss-O-Suck’s eyes were china-blue. “Wait,” he said. “Look!”

  Vera, who had given up trying to imitate locust or danseuse or indeed anything, was en pointe and running chains of steps out across the ash, complicating and recomplicating them in a daze of technique until she felt exactly like one of the ribbons flying from Rhys’s sleeve. It was a release for her, they were always saying at the Prospekt Theatre, to do the most difficult things, all kinds of allegro and batterie bewilderingly entangled, then suddenly the great turning jump forbidden to female dancers for more than a hundred years. As she danced she reduced the distinction between heath and sky. The horizon, never convinced of itself, melted. Vera was left crossing and recrossing a space steadily less definable. A smile came to Kiss-O-Suck’s lips; he pushed the razor away with one fat little hand and cried:

  “She’s floating!”

  “That won’t help you, you bastard,” Egon Rhys warned him.

  He made the great sweeping cut which a week before had driven the razor through the bone and gristle at the base of Toni Ingarden’s throat.

  It was a good cut. He liked it so much he let it pass over the dwarf’s head; stopped the weapon dead; and, tossing it from one hand to the other, laughed. The dwarf looked surprised. “Ha!” shouted Rhys. Suddenly he spun round on one bent leg as if he had heard another enemy behind him. He threw himself sideways, cutting out right and left faster than you could see. “And this is how I do it,” he panted, “when it comes down to the really funny business.” The second razor appeared magically in his other hand and between them they parcelled up the emptiness, slashing wildly about with a life of their own while Rhys wobbled and ducked across the surface of the desert with a curious, shuffling, buckle-kneed, bent-elbowed gait. “Now I’ll show you how I can kick!” he called.

  But Kiss-O-Suck, who had watched this performance with an interested air, murmuring judicially at some difficult stroke, only smiled and moved away. He had the idea—it had never been done before—to link in sequence a medley of cartwheels, “flying Dementos,” and handsprings, which would bounce him so far into the smoky air of the arena, spinning over and over himself with his knees tucked into his stomach, that eventually he would be able to look down on the crowd, like a firework before it burst. “Tah!” he whispered, as he nerved himself up. “Codpoorlie, tah!”

  Soon he and Rhys were floating too, leaping and twirling and wriggling higher and higher, attaining by their efforts a space which had no sense of limit or closure. But Vera Ghillera was always ahead of them, and seemed to generate their rhythm as she went.

  Deserts spread to the northeast of the city, and in a wide swathe to its south.

  They are of all kinds, from peneplains of disintegrating metallic dust— out of which rise at intervals lines of bony incandescent hills—to localised chemical sumps, deep, tarry, and corrosive, over whose surfaces glitter small flies with papery wings and perhaps a pair of legs too many. These regions are full of old cities which differ from Vriko only in the completeness of their deterioration. The traveller in them may be baked to death, or, discovered with his eyelids frozen together, leave behind only a journal which ends in the middle of a sentence.

  The Metal-Salt Marshes, Fenlen Island, the Great Brown Waste: the borders of regions as exotic as this are drawn differently on the maps of competing authorities, but they are at least bounded in the conventional sense. Allman’s Heath, whose borders can be agreed by everyone, does not seem to be. Neither does it seem satisfactory now to say that while those deserts lie outside the city, Allman’s Heath lies within it.

  The night was quiet.

  Five to eleven, and except where the weir agitated its surface, the canal at Allman’s Reach was covered with the lightest and most fragile web of ice. A strong moon cast its blue and gamboge light across the boarded-up fronts of the houses by the towpath. They don’t look as if much life ever goes on in them, thought the watchman, an unimaginative man at the beginning of his night’s work, which was to walk from there up to the back of the Atteline Quarter (where he could get a cup of tea if he wanted one) and down again. He banged his hands together in the cold. As he stood there he saw three figures wade into the water on the other side of the canal.

  They were only ten yards upstream, between him and the weir, and the moonlight fell on them clearly. They were wrapped up in cloaks and hoods, “like brown-paper parcels, or statues tied up in sacks,” he insisted later, and under these garments their bodies seemed to be jerking and writhing in a continual rhythmic motion, though for him it was too disconnected to be called a dance. The new ice parted for them like damp sugar floating on the water. They paid no attention to the watchman, but forded the canal, tallest first, shortest last, and disappeared down the cinder lane which goes via Orves and the observatory to the courtyard near the Plain Moon Café.

  The watchman rubbed his hands and looked round for a minute or two, as if he expected something else to happen. “Eleven o’clock,” he called at last, and though he couldn’t commit himself to a description which seemed so subject to qualification as to be in bad faith, added: “And all’s all.”

  A YOUNG MAN’S JOURNEY TO VIRICONIUM

  A YOUNG MAN’S JOURNEY TO VIRICONIUM

  On the day of the enthronement of the new archbishop, the “badly decomposed” body of a man was found on the roof of York Minster by a TV technician. He had been missing for eight months from a local hospital. He had fallen, it was said, from the tower; but no one had any idea how he had come to be there. I heard this on the local radio station in the day; what excited me about it was that they never repeated the item, and no mention of it was made either on the national broadcasts later in the day, or in the coverage of the ceremony itself. Mr. Ambrayses was less impressed.

  “A chance in a thousand it will be of any use to us,” he estimated. “One in a thousand.”

  I went to York anyway, and he came with me for some reason of his own—he paid visits to a secondhand bookshop and a taxidermist’s. The streets were daubed with political slogans; even while the ceremony was going on, council employees were working hard along the route of the procession to paint them out. The man on the roof, I discovered, had been missing from an ordinary surgical unit, so I had had the journey for nothing, as Mr. Ambrayses predicted. What interested us at that time was any event connected with a mental or—especially—a geriatric home.

  “We all want Viriconium,” Mr. Ambrayses was fond of saying. “But it is the old who want it most!” That night on the way home he added,

  “No one here needs it. Do you see?”

  The 11:52 Leeds stopping train was full of teenagers. The older boys looked confused and violent in their short haircuts, faces and jaws thrown forward purple and white with cold; the girls watched the
m slyly, shrieked with laughter, then looked down and picked at their fingerless gloves. They stuck their heads out of the windows and shouted, ‘Fuck off!’ into the rush of air. Later when we got off the train we saw them hopping backwards and forwards over a metal barrier in the sodium light; unfathomable and energetic as grasshoppers in the sun. Sensing my disappointment Mr. Ambrayses said gently, “On occasion we all want to go there so badly that we will invent a clue.”

  “I’m not old,” I said.

  Mr. Ambrayses had lived next door to me for two years. At first I was only aware of him when I was trying to watch the news. A body under a coloured blanket, slumped at the foot of a corrugated iron fence; the camera moving in on a small red smear like a nosebleed cleaned up with lavatory paper, then as if puzzledly on to helicopters, rubble, someone important being ushered into a building, a woman walking past the end of a street. Immediately Mr. Ambrayses’s low appreciative laughter would come “Hur hur hur” through the thin partition wall, so that I lost the thread. “Hur hur,” he would laugh, and I felt as if I was watching a television in a foreign country. He liked only the variety shows and situation comedies.

  His laughter seemed to sensitise me to him, and I began to see him everywhere, like a new word I had learned: in his garden where the concrete paths, glazed with rain, reflected the sky; in Marie’s café, a middle-aged man in a dirty suede coat, with jam on his fingers—licking at them with short dabbing licks like a child or an animal; in Sainsbury’s food hall with an empty metal basket in the crook of his arm, staring up and down the tinned-meat aisle. He didn’t seem to have anything to do. I saw him on a day-trip bus to Matlock Bath, wearing one sheepskin mitten. His trousers, which were much too large for him, so that the arse of them hung down between his legs in a gloomy flap, were sewn up at the back with bright yellow thread as coarse as string. The bus was full of old women who nodded and smiled and read all the signs out to one another as if they were constructing or rehearsing between them the landscape as they went through it.