Viriconium (32 page)

“Old man, are you ill?”

“You did not hear it, Methvet Nian, the voice from the moon, with its ‘great wing against the sky.’ The insect’s head; the landings at night; the Sign of the Locust: all are one! I must go north immediately.
All are one!
”

“Cellur, what is it?” begged the Queen.

“It is the end of the world if we are too late.”

We value our suffering. It is intrinsic, purgative, and it enables us to perceive the universe directly. Moreover, it is a private thing which can neither be shared nor diminished by contact. This at least was Galen Hornwrack’s view, who, by the very nature of his calling, had been much concerned with pain. It was a view enshrined in the airless room above the Rue Sepile, and in his relationship with the boy, whose function had been less that of a nurse than of hierophant at his master’s lustral agonies. As Hornwrack had grown used to the smell of self-recrimination—which in the Rue Sepile as nowhere else is compounded of dead geraniums, dry rot, and one’s own blood squeezed out of towels—he had also grown to welcome it, as he welcomed the black fevers of his deeper wounds, in which he rediscovered a symbolic reenactment of his crimes.

In Methvet Nian’s infirmary, however, he had found none of this, but instead open casements and cheerful voices and, worst of all, that good-humoured competence by which the professional nurse—who otherwise could not bear it—demeans the pain and indignity suffered by her charge. In short: they had stitched him up but refused to let him brood. Some three days after the events in the Queen’s sitting room, therefore, he had extricated himself from the place and now stalked the corridors of the palace in an uncertain temper.

His cloak had been returned to him, washed and mended. Beneath it he wore the mail of Methvet Nian, and at his side hung the unaccustomed sword. Both chafed, as did the manner in which he had come by them. He had, it is true, gone to some trouble to find for the sword a scabbard of dull moulded leather, and it looked well on him. Nevertheless, the sword is a weapon chiefly of the High City, and he felt ill-at-ease with it. He had had little training in its use. As he hurried toward the throne room for what he hoped would be the last time, he touched the knife hidden beneath his cloak, to assure himself he was not unarmed. As for the Queen’s intentions, he understood none of them. She had first tried to bribe and latterly to patronize him; he was full of resentment. It was a dangerous frame of mind in which to encounter the Queen’s dwarf, who had on his face a sardonic grin.

His short legs were clad in cracked black leather, his thick trunk in a sleeveless jerkin of some woven material, green with age; his bare forearms were brown and gnarled; and his hands resembled a bunch of hawthorn roots. Indeed he looked very like a small tree, planted up against the throne-room doors, stunted and unlovely against their serpentine metallic inlays and ornamental hinges. On his head was a curious truncated conical hat, also of leather and much worn.

“Here is our bravo, with his new sword,” he said matter-of-factly.

“So the dwarf says,” murmured Hornwrack, pleasantly enough. “Let me pass.”

The dward sniffed. He looked along the passage, first one way and then the other. He crooked a finger, and when Hornwrack bent down to listen, whispered, “The thing is, my lord assassin, that I understand none of this.”

And he jerked his horny thumb over his shoulder to indicate, presumably, the throne room.

“Pardon?”

“Voices, from above. Insects. Madmen, and madwomen too. One comes back from the dead (albeit he’s a good friend of mine), while another runs like a greyhound at the sound of a song. Both old friends of mine. What do you think of that?”

He looked around.

“The
Queen,
” he said, lowering his voice, “gives away the sword of tegeus-Cromis!”

He laughed delightedly at Hornwrack’s start of surprise, revealing broken old teeth.

“Now you and I are plain men. We’re fighting men, I think you’ll agree. Do you agree?”

“This sword,” said Hornwrack. “I—”

“That being so, us being ordinary fighting men, we must have an understanding, you and I. We must treat gently with one another on this daft journey north. And we must look after the mad folk; for after all, they cannot look after themselves. Eh?”

Hornwrack made as if to pass into the throne room.

“I’ll make no journey with you or anyone else, Dwarf. As for gifts, they can be easily returned. You are all madmen to me!”

He had not gone so much as a step towards the inlaid doors when a terrific blow in the small of his back pitched him forward onto his face. Tears filled his eyes. Astonished and desperate—he thought the dwarf had stabbed him—he fumbled for his knife and scrabbled into a kneeling position: only to find his tormentor grinning ironically at him, unarmed but for those disproportionate arthritic hands. Before he could haul himself to his feet, the dwarf—whose head was now on a level with his own—had first embraced him lightly, then spat in his ear and hit him again, this time somewhere down below his ribs. His knife clattered away. His breath deserted him. Through his own heaving and choking he heard the dwarf say coldly—

“I like you, Galen Hornwrack. But that is the sword of my old friend, which was given you in good faith.”

Hornwrack shook his head and took his chance. He reached forward and clasped with both hands the nape of the dwarf’s neck, then pulled him forward sharply. As their heads connected, the dwarf’s nose broke like a dry stick. “Black piss,” he said surprisedly, and sat down. They went seriously at it then, and neither could get the advantage: for though the dwarf was cunning, old, and hard, the assassin was as quick as a snake; and both of them knew well the cul-de-sacs and wineshop floors where the anonymous chivalry of the Low City settles its quarrels amid the slime and the sawdust.

It was Cellur who discovered them there twenty minutes later. There was a yellow malice in their eyes as they staggered about in the bloody-mouthed gloom taunting one another in hoarse, clogged voices—but it was fading like a sunset, and as he watched, in the puzzled manner of someone who doesn’t quite know what it is he’s watching, he heard this final exchange:

“I beg my lord the sheep’s arse to change his mind.”

“My brain is as addled as a harlot’s egg. Get me out of this place, Dwarf. It stinks of kindness. North if you like. What do I care?”

Cellur could not (or would not) articulate his fears more clearly. He questioned Fay Glass, it is true: but nothing was revealed, her contribution being only a babble of archaisms and ancient songs; bits and pieces—or so Alstath Fulthor maintained—plucked from the racial memory as she pursued her lonely temporal descent. “She understands us: but speaks from a vast distance, no longer sure what language to use, or what to say.” Despite this, Cellur argued, it was clear that she knew the secret of the insect’s head—why else should she show such distress at her own failure to communicate? Since she could not tell them what had happened there, it was, he repeated, essential to follow her back to the North.

“She is in herself the message: and a call for help.”

When Fulthor protested that, as seneschal, he could not abandon the Queen while the Sign of the Locust grew so in power, harassing daily the Reborn of the city and infiltrating its prime functions, Cellur only said: “I shall need you. Your people in the Great Brown Waste will not treat with me. They are too far gone on this ‘road to the Past’ you describe. When we have discerned the meaning of the insect’s head, that will be the time; when we have understood the warning from the moon, and discovered the landing sites in the North, then we shall know what to do about the Sign of the Locust.”

And Fulthor could only stare out into Viriconium, where at night in a lunar chiaroscuro of gamboge and blue, the long processions wound silently from one street to another, to the accompaniment of a small aimless wind.

The weather deteriorated as he watched, a raw air piling up against the massif of the High City and filling the Low with damp. Beneath a thick grey sky the watery plazas took on a wan and occult look, while in the pensions of the Rue Sepile the old women coughed all day over their affairs, and the atmosphere became adhesive with the smell of cabbage. The walls seeped. It was, all agreed, no time to be living in the Artists’ Quarter, and, perhaps as an addendum to this theory, gossip remarked the sudden disappearance of Galen Hornwrack. Had he indeed quarrelled with Ansel Verdigris, his erstwhile crony (some said over a coin, though others maintained it was a woman from the North, or even the wording of a verse in a ballade of smoked fish)? Up and down the hill from Minnet-Saba, huddling closer to brazier and guttering cresset, his enemies and rivals scratched their heads—or else, distempered, fought among themselves.

The object of this attention, meanwhile, languished in the draughty corridors of Methven’s hall, where he examined his wounds from hour to hour and honed morosely his knife, gripped by the phthisis and melancholy of early winter. He had little contact with his new companions. He avoided Fulthor and thus, of necessity, the discussions in the throne room. Once or twice he heard the madwoman singing in some chamber. Of Tomb, who had in such a peculiar manner befriended him (at least he supposed it was that), he had no news. Methvet Nian having at last agreed to an expedition, therefore provision must be made of food, horses, weapons, and such safe conducts as were necessary. The dwarf had concerned himself with this, and with preparations of his own, and was not much about the palace.

Hornwrack shrugged, paced the corridors at night, gazing in a sort of savage abstraction at the old machines and whispering sculptures, and refused to answer his door. On the day of their departure he had to be fetched from his apartment (he was staring into a mirror). On the day of their departure, sleet fell, quickly soaking the striped awnings in the street markets and filling the gutters with a miserable slush. On the day of their departure a vision was vouchsafed to them; Tomb the Dwarf remembered a legend at whose birth he had presided long ago; and their ill-fated expedition acquired its tutelary or presiding spirit—

This apparition, which was to remain with them until the peculiar termination of their journey, manifested itself first in the throne room at Viriconium. Besides Cellur the Birdmaker, only Hornwrack was present. (Methvet Nian was to watch their departure from the city by the Gate of Nigg, and had gone there early. Alstath Fulthor fretted in an outer yard with Fay Glass and the horses. Tomb the Dwarf, having worked all night in his caravan—white heat flickering out over the tailboard to the accompaniment of a sad hammer—was dozing in some corner.) It was not yet light: the palace was chilly, echoic, nautiloid. Cellur, hoping to contact his own machines in their redoubt beneath the Lendalfoot estuary, passed a yellow hand through his beard. “Brown, green, counting,” he whispered, and in response a flock of grey images twittered like bats across the five false windows of the throne room. Clearly this was not the result he had forecast. “Do you see nothing?” he said impatiently. “I must have fresh news!”

“Be quick, old man,” said Hornwrack neutrally. He yawned and rubbed his face, feeling an obscure tension in the muscles of his neck. This he put down to being woken early. Like Fulthor, for reasons more or less complex, he was anxious to be off. Alone with wound, knife, and mirror over the last twenty-four hours, he had been surprised to find that he no longer regretted his psychic severance from the Low City. He thought now only rarely of the boy in the Rue Sepile, the bitter smell of dead geraniums, instead looked forward with a dry eagerness, curious as to the fate of his obsessions now that their confining frame had been removed. He massaged his neck. The old man muttered fractiously. In the upper air of the throne room the light was becoming stratified, bands of very pale pink and yellow leaking through the high eastern skylights. Dawn had arrived early. Fresh news! “Be quick!”

“Abrogate all rituals,”
said a soft confidential voice from somewhere above him. He looked up, startled. It sniggered.
“What a lovely piece of
meat!”

Up near the vaulted ceiling a salmon-coloured layer of light had begun curdling into grey muculent lumps and strings which floated about like bits of fat in a lukewarm soup, bumping one another gently. After a minute or two of slow tidal effort, these in their turn merged to form a thick, lobed nucleus, from which presently evolved the crude figure of a man. Hornwrack studied this process with disgust, noting how, as they strained to become arms and legs, the lobes heaved and struggled like something trapped in an elastic bag. He caught the birdmaker staring puzzledly upwards and sniffed sarcastically.

“Have you finished tampering, old man?”

Cellur made an impatient movement with one hand.

“Hush!”

The man hanging in the air above them (if it was a man) wore clothes of some rough faded material, originally black, tailored in a fashion which had not been common in the city for over a century. Where it could be seen, his skin was pallid, greenish, covered in withered silvery patches. Over his face was clamped a kind of mask or breathing apparatus from the black snout of which sprouted many truncated tubes and proboscides; this was attached by four black straps which, cutting into the swollen flesh of his cheeks, met in the straggling yellow hair at the back of his head. He was enormously fat, as if he had passed much of his life in a sphere where human conditions of growth no longer pertained: his hypertrophied buttocks floated over their heads like shadowy moons, accompanied by a thin monologue, cabalistic and futile, of which no sense might be made whatever—