Viriconium (20 page)

“They are beautiful,” said tegeus-Cromis. “It seems a pity that a homicidal dwarf should discover such beauty. Why do they dance in that fashion?”

Tomb chuckled.

“To say that I appreciated that would be a lie. I suspect they have a method of communication with the brain many times more efficient than crude passes of the hand. In a sense, they
are
the brain at this moment—”

“Who are they, Tomb?”

“They are men of the Afternoon Cultures, my friend. They are the Resurrected Men.”

Cromis shook his head. The dancers swayed, their cloaks a whirl of emerald and black. “You cannot expect me to understand any of this.”

Tomb leapt to his feet. Suddenly, he danced away from Cromis and the Queen in a queer little parody of the ballet of the brain, an imitation full of sadness and humour. He clapped his hands and cackled.

“Cromis,” he said, “it was a master stroke. Listen—”

He sat down again.

“I lied to Trinor. Nothing was simpler than dealing with the
geteit
chemosit.
Those golems stopped operating twenty minutes after I had entered this room. Wherever they were, they froze, their mechanisms ceased to function. For all I know, they are rusting. Cellur taught me that.

“What he did not tell me was that a dialogue could be held with the brain: that, I learnt for myself, in the next twenty minutes. Then—

“Cromis, Cellur was wrong. One vital flaw in his reasoning led to what you have seen today. He regarded the
chemosit
as simple destroyers, but the Northmen were nearer to the truth when they called them the brain-stealers. The
chemosit
are harvesters.

“It was their function in the days of the Afternoon Cultures not to
prevent
the resurrection of a warrior, but to bring the contents of his skull here, or to a similar centre, and give it into care of the artificial brain. This applied equally to a dead friend or a foe actually slain by the
chemosit
—I think they saw war in a different way to ourselves, perhaps as a game.

“When Canna Moidart denied the
chemosit
their full function by using them solely as fighters, she invited destruction.

“Now. Each of the ‘windows’ in this place is in reality a tank of sustaining fluid, in which is suspended the brain of a dead man. Upon the injection of a variety of other fluids and nutrients, that brain may be stimulated to re-form its departed owner.

“On the third day of our captivity here, the artificial brain reconstructed Fimbruthil and Lonath, those with the emerald cloaks.

“On the fourth day, Bellin, and Mader-Monad, and Sleth. See how those three dance! And yesterday, the rest. The brain then linked me to their minds. They agreed to help me. Today, we put our plan into effect.

“Twelve corridors lead from this chamber, like the spokes of a wheel miles in diameter: the Resurrected Men were born in the northwestern corridor. At a given signal, they issued from their wombs, crept here, and slew the guards Trinor had left when he went to his death. The fourteen of us stepped into the light columns. From there, by a property of the brain complex, we were . . . shifted . . . to the desert outside.

“We waited there for Trinor and his men. By then, of course, he was . . . otherwise involved. We eventually reentered the bunker, and arrived in time to save you from yourself.”

tegeus-Cromis smiled stiffly.

“That was well done, Tomb. And what now? Will you send them back to sleep?”

The dwarf frowned.

“Cromis! We will have an army of them! Even now, they are awakening the brain fully. We will build a new Viriconium together, the Methven and the Reborn Men, side by side—”

The diamond walls of the chamber shone and glittered. The brain hummed. An arctic coldness descended on the mind of tegeus-Cromis. He looked at his hands.

“Tomb,” he said. “You are aware that this will destroy the empire just as surely as Canna Moidart destroyed it?”

The dwarf came hurriedly to his feet.

“What?”

“They are too beautiful, Tomb; they are too accomplished. If you go on with this, there will be no new empire—instead, they will absorb us, and after a millennium’s pause, the Afternoon Cultures will resume their long sway over the earth.

“No malice will be involved. Indeed, they may thank us many times over for bringing them back to the world. But, as you have said yourself, they have a view of life that is alien to us; and do not forget that it was them who made the waste around us.”

As he gazed at the perfect bodies of the Resurrected Men, a massive sadness, a brutal sense of incompleteness, came upon him. He studied the honest face of the dwarf before him, but could find no echo of his own emotion—only puzzlement, and, beneath that, a continuing elation.

“Tomb, I want no part of this.”

As he walked toward the arch from which they had issued, his head downcast so that he should not see that queer dance—so that he should not be ensnared and fascinated by its inhumanity—Methvet Nian, Queen Jane of Viriconium, barred his way. Her violet eyes pierced him.

“Cromis, you should not feel like this. It is Grif’s death that has brought you down. You blame yourself, you see things crookedly. Please—”

tegeus-Cromis said: “Madam, I caused his death. I am sick of myself; I am sick of being constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time; I am sick of the endless killing that is necessary to right my mistakes. He was my
friend
. Even Trinor was once my friend.

“But that is not at issue.

“My lady, we regarded the Northmen as barbarians, and they were.” He laughed. “Today,
we
are the barbarians.
Look
at them!”

And when she turned to watch the choreography of the brain, the celebration of ten thousand years of death and rebirth, he fled.

He ran toward the light. When he passed the corpse of his dead friend, he began to weep again. He picked up his sword. He tried to smash a crystal window with its hilt. The corridor oppressed him. Beyond the windows, the dead brains drifted. He ran on.

“You should have done it,” whispered Birkin Grif in the soft spaces of his skull; and, “OUROBUNDOS!” giggled the insane door, as he fell through it and into the desert wind. His cloak cracking and whipping about him, so that he resembled a crow with broken wings, he stumbled toward the black airboat. His mind mocked him. His face was wet.

He threw himself into the command bridge. Green light swam about him, and the dead Northmen stared blindly at him as he turned on the power. He did not choose a direction, it chose him. Under full acceleration, he fled out into the empty sky.

And so tegeus-Cromis, Lord of the Methven, was not present at the forming of the Host of the Reborn Men, at their arming in the depths of the Lesser Waste, or their marching. He did not see the banners.

Neither was he witness to the fall of Soubridge, when, a month after the sad death of Birkin Grif, Tomb the Giant Dwarf led the singing men of the Afternoon Cultures against a great army of Northmen, and took the victory.

He was not present when the wolves burned Soubridge, and, in desperation, died.

He did not see the Storming of the Gates, when Alstath Fulthor—after leading a thousand Resurrected Men over the Monar Mountains in the depths of winter—attacked the Pastel City from the northeast;

Or the brave death of Rotgob Mungo, a captain of the North, as he tried in vain to break the long Siege of the Artists’ Quarter, and bled his life out in the Bistro Californium;

Nor was he there when Tomb met Alstath Fulthor on the Proton Circuit, coming from the opposite end of the city, and shook his hand.

He was not present at that final retaking of Methven’s hall, when five hundred men died in one hour, and Tomb got his famous wound. They looked for him there, but he did not come.

He did not break with them into the inner room of the palace, there among the drifting curtains of light; or discover beneath the dying wreck of Usheen the Sloth, the Queen’s Beast, the cold and beautiful corpse of Canna Moidart, the last twist of the knife.

It is rumoured that the Young Queen wept over the Old, her cousin. But he did not see that, either.

EPILOGUE

Methvet Nian, the Queen of Viriconium, stood at early evening on the sand dunes that lay like a lost country between the land and the sea. Swift and tattered scraps of rag, black gulls sped and fought over her downcast head.

She was a tall and supple woman, clad in a gown of heavy russet velvet, and her skin was neither painted nor jewelled, as was the custom of the time. The nine identical Rings of Neap glittered from her long fingers. Her hair, which recalled the colour of autumn rowans, hung in soft waves to her waist, coiled about her breasts.

For a while, she walked the tideline, examining the objects cast up by the sea: paying particular attention to a smooth stone here, a translucent spiny shell there, picking up a bottle the colour of dragonfly armour, throwing down a branch whitened and peculiarly carved by the water. She watched the gulls, but their cries depressed her.

She led her grey horse by its white bridle across the dunes, and found the stone path to the tower which had no name: though it was called by some after that stretch of seaboard on which it stood, that is, Balmacara.

Balmacara was broken—its walls were blackened, it was like a broken tooth—and despite the spring that had brought green back to the land after a winter of darkness and harsh contrasts, the rowan woods that surrounded it were without life.

Among them in the growing gloom of twilight, she came upon the wreck of the crystal launch that had brought down the tower. It was black, and a wolf’s head with wine-red eyes stared at her from its buckled hull— quite without menace, for the paint was already beginning to peel.

She passed it, and came to the door; she tethered her horse.

She called out, but there was no answer.

She climbed fifty stone steps, and found that night had already taken the husk of the tower. Dusk was brown in the window arches, heaped up in great drifts in the corners. Her footsteps echoed emptily, but there was a strange, quiet music in the tower, a mournful, steely mode, cadences that brought tears to her violet eyes.

He sat on a wall-bed covered with blue embroidered silks. Around him on the walls hung trophies: a powered battle-axe he had got from his friend Tomb the Dwarf after the sea fight at Mingulay in the Rivermouth Campaign; the gaudy standard of Thorisman Carlemaker, whom he had defeated single-handed in the Mountains of Monadliath; queer weapons, and astrological equipment discovered in deserts.

He did not look up as she entered.

His fingers depressed the hard strings of his instrument; its tone was low and melancholy. He recited the following verse, which he had composed on the Cruachan Ridge in Monar:

“Strong visions: I have strong visions of this place in the empty times. . . . Far below there are wavering pines. . . . I left the rowan elphin woods to fulminate on ancient headlands, dipping slowly into the glasen seas of evening. . . . On the devastated peaks of hills we ease the barrenness into our thin bones like a foot into a tight shoe. . . . The narrative of this place: other than the smashed arris of the ridge there are only sad winds and silences. . . . I lay on the cairn one more rock. . . . I am possessed by Time. . . .”

When he had finished, she said, “My lord, we waited for you to come.”

In the gloom, he smiled. He still wore his torn cloak, his ragged, dented shirt of mail. The nameless sword was at his side. He had this mannerism: that when he was worried or nervous, his hand strayed out unknown to him and caressed its hilt.

He said with the grave politeness of his time, “Lady, I would have come had I felt there was any need for me.”

“Lord Cromis,” she answered, “you are absurd.” She laughed, and did not let him see her pity. “Death brought you here to sulk and bite yourself like an animal. In Viriconium, we have ceased to brood on death.”

“That is your choice, madam.”

“The Reborn Men are among us: they give us new arts, new perspectives; and from us they learn how to live in a land without despoiling it. If it brings you satisfaction, Cromis, you were correct—the empire is dead.

“But so are the Afternoon Cultures. And something wholly new has replaced them both.”

He rose, and went to the window. His tread was silent and swift. He faced her, and the sun bled to death behind him.

“Is there room in this new empire for an involuntary assassin?” he asked. “Is there?”

“Cromis, you are a fool.” And she would allow him no answer to that.

Later, he made her look at the Name Stars.

“There,” he said. “You will not deny this: no one who came after could read what is written there. All empires gutter, and leave a language their heirs cannot understand.”

She smiled up at him, and pushed her hair back from her face.

“Alstath Fulthor the Reborn Man could tell you what it means,” she said.

“It is important to my nature,” he admitted, “that it remain a mystery to me. If you will command him to keep a close mouth, I will come back.”