Viriconium (36 page)

“I thought I recalled the man,” Cellur said. “Perhaps it was a story heard long ago. And yet the face was very familiar.”

“Quite.”

“I cannot shake off a sense of foreboding.”

At the top of the cliff, about to turn inland, they were accosted by the spectre of the ancient airboatman. Opening and shutting its mouth like a deformed goldfish, it approached them out of the eddying sleet, rotating slowly about its vertical axis. Although, as before, it appeared to maintain only the most precarious contact with the world, a thin grey snow seemed to be settling on its shoulders, the ghostly precipitate of some foreign continuum. It was agitated. It came very close to Hornwrack and plucked at his cloak. (He felt nothing until he tried to beat it off with the flat of his hands, when there was some slight, gelatinous resistance.)

“Few lawn!” it shouted through its cupped hands, as from a great distance. “Fog . . . Forn . . . Fenling. Oh, crikey.” It pointed desperately out to sea. It looked inland and shook its head. “FENGLIN! nuktis ’agalma . . . 254 da parte . . . ten cans for a boat load . . .
Fengle!
”

And it took up station above his head like a fat angel, staring tragically backwards as they moved inland and signing madly whenever it caught his eye.

Still later, Tomb the Dwarf rode up to his side. He held out the weapon Hornwrack had lost on the quayside.

“You dropped your sword, soldier.”

Hornwrack said bitterly, “Listen, old Dwarf, I thought I had got rid of that.
I am not him.
Whatever he was to you. Don’t you understand that?”

The dwarf grinned and shrugged, still holding the sword out expectantly.

Hornwrack looked up at the thing floating above him. Seeing this, it steered itself rapidly toward him, clearing its throat. He groaned, accepted the sword. Both his spectres had returned to haunt him.

The weather now changed. Low cloud and sleet rolled away east and south to be replaced by a pale sky and good visibility. A wind like a razor blew from the north. On a succession of bright but bitterly cold days they penetrated the habitable margin of the Great Brown Waste, to find a frozen crust over deep, wet peat. Progress was slow. If a bird called,
tak tak,
like an echo in a stony gully, the madwoman followed it with her eyes, tilting her head, smiled. She was nervous, but now rode ahead of Alstath Fulthor. She had led them into a region of high dissected plateaux over which hummed the icy wind, and then cast about over the bleak hillsides for a while like a lost bitch. Little paths ran everywhere, contouring the salients. As far as anyone could make out she followed them randomly. They led her in the end to a stone-crowned, steep-streamed escarpment which sheltered among its boulder fields sparse woods of stunted oak. On its lower slopes might be discerned the lanes and enclosures of a settlement, the walls toppled, the sheepfolds in poor repair. Behind the village rose the eroded shapes of the Agdon Roches, from which it took its name: a string of gritstone outcrops quarried long ago for building stone so that they formed a succession of bays and shattered promontories.

“This is a vile bloody place.”

Hornwrack: Paucemanly’s ghost had left him alone for a while, vanishing with a wet pop and a feeble grin as if remembering a prior appointment. He was relieved, but found himself with nothing to think about but the cold. He was used to the city, where winter is episodic. The wind whistles across the junction of the Rue Sepile and Vientiane Avenue. The women clutch their shawls tightly and dash laughing from house to house. There is always a window to watch them from while you drink mulled wine prepared by a boy. Not so here: his fingers were welded to the reins like the fingers of a stone horseman falling apart in some provincial square. He had been miserable for days.

“I’ve seen worse,” said the dwarf speculatively, as if he wondered whether he had. He wore his leather hat at a queer angle; his arms were empurpled with the cold.

The wreckage of an ancient landscape lay across their path.

The metaphysical disputes of the late Afternoon Cultures, raging here across the floodplain of some vanished river, had turned it into a corridor of black ash strewn with rounded stones. It was zoned and undulating; in places stripped to the underlying rock, ten or twenty feet thick in others. Every summer a little more of it dried up and blew away into the waste. Some of the stones were quite large, some no bigger than a fist, and each stood on a little pediment of wind-smoothed ash. Some isolated colonies of bilberry and ling grew here and there, raised by the same erosive process until they resembled a chain of hairy islets. Outlier or prefigurement of the deeper waste to come, it was a little less than two miles wide, and across it could be seen the cracked buttresses of the Agdon Roches, brushed at their summits with rosy light. A thin white mist flowed down the gullies and stony cloughs at their feet, drifting through the hanging oakwoods and filling up the village street so that only the roofs and upper storeys of the cottages were visible. Through the still air a dog could be heard barking; sheep bleated from the intakes. In a small field stood one cow. All this one might almost have touched, so precisely enamelled did it seem on the bright surface of the air: but Fay Glass would make no move towards it.

“She is frightened of the maze.”

“And yet,” said Fulthor, returning from a brief foray, “her own people must have made it.” Damp ash was caked between the fingers of his gauntlets. The discovery of the earthwork had filled him with an obscure excitement. Her subsequent refusal to enter or even pass it seemed only to have sharpened this. “They were obsessed by patterns, those who came north in the final desperate days of the Resurrection determined to discover a way back.” He smiled whitely. “As if the fingers of the Past do not already brush our cheeks, waking or sleeping—” He stared back into the maze. “She is a child, I’m afraid.”

(“We gave them life,” the dwarf said. “How were we to know they would go mad?” No one answered him.)

“It is not just the woman,” said Cellur. “I feel it too.” And he looked out over the little strip of land. “Error is piled on error.”

“Nevertheless, we go through,” announced Fulthor, setting the madwoman on her horse.

“There. You shall sit safely. It was bravely done to guide us so far.”

She looked at him as if he were a stone.

The basic earthwork, cut into the compacted ash, was supplemented partly by piles of stones, partly by raised banks or dykes: the whole being roughly radial in character and some fifteen feet deep. Are we to guess its purpose? In the Time of the Locust sign and substance become fatally blurred together: it was not so much a maze, perhaps, as a great ideogram, a design representing some barely achievable state of mind; but this said, we have said nothing. Down in the trenches the ash showed evidence of regular traffic, and cold, damp airs moved purposelessly. Fulthor’s motives were unclear. He could equally well have crossed the plain to reach the village. He would not discuss this. He became lost but was slow to admit it. When he did, the girl would not help him, though she had plainly been in the maze before. He set Tomb to climbing one of the walls, but the stuff fell away in fibrous lumps when he was near the top and he slid down in a shower of it without having seen anything. “I seemed to be facing south.”

Thereafter, they travelled at random.

An hour passed (they came upon the hoofprints of their own animals, travelling in the opposite direction) and then another.

A bird flying overhead; the exchange of arguments at a junction; all normal events receded and became stripped of meaning. Queer contractile sensations in Hornwrack’s skull recalled to him his colourless Low City fevers with their intimations of failure and death. (At these times a desultory buzzing had filled his ears, as of a wasp trapped among the dry geraniums in some airless attic: he heard it now.) Looking uncomfortably round he saw that the others were similarly affected. The whole party had halted. Near him the dwarf was shaking his big head about and blinking desperately. Fay Glass had somehow fallen off her horse and lay on the ground glaring madly up at the sky. The walls of the maze began to mutate, and beckoned Hornwrack with limbs like the first delicately curled fronds of a fern in spring. Now the world toppled sideways with a jolt, as it sometimes does on the verge of sleep. Simultaneously he began to perceive it as if through a cluster of tiny hexagonal lenses: for a moment he looked out with horror onto a faceted universe. He could make nothing of it. He thought he was dying.

Fay Glass vomited suddenly, leapt to her feet, and ran off down the passage. Hornwrack followed more slowly, leading his horse, concentrating very carefully in case the ground should tilt further and spill him off into the mosaic void he now conceived to be surrounding him. He could hear the other three tottering along behind him, crying out like the newly blind.

The maze, he now understood, had lain in wait for him since his flight from the Bistro Californium, its centre coexistent with the hub of that affair. As he struggled down its cindery passageways he imagined himself stabbed again and again, a half-successful execution presided over by the mad laughter of the poet Ansel Verdigris. He lost his horse. Clutching the phantom wound in his side he groaned and drew his flawed steel knife (as if a gesture remembered from one maze might release him from the complexities of another). Despairing, he stumbled out into a circular space about thirty feet across, where he was relieved abruptly of the mosaic universe and saw normally again. This central stage or arena was raised a few inches above the level of the surrounding maze, and in the middle of it there waited an
insect larger than a man
—

The violation, if there was one, was hieratic, notional. Fay Glass lay like a corpse.
The creature crouched over her.
It resembled no insect Hornwrack had ever seen but was rather a
composite of all insects
. From its
segmented
thorax,
which was of a curious
smoky yellow colour
and as shiny as lacquered bamboo, sprang the veiny
wings of the ichneumon fly,
the wedge-shaped mask of the common wasp, the mysterious
upcurved abdomen of the mantislike a symbol
from a forbidden language. Its
eyes
were lit from within, or seemed to be. They were
pale green,
and streaked with orange. A mass of palps and maxillae hung beneath its head, clattering spasmodically. He thought of the wasteland grasshopper with its serrated legs and arid stridulations. He thought of flight through vast abandoned regions, and the world he knew fell away from him so suddenly that he was sick. When he could see again, the madwoman had come back to life.

She made no attempt to get from beneath the insect, but, like something emerging painfully from a larval stage, groped and writhed about until she lay on her stomach, her neck twisted so that her white motionless face was turned to the assassin.

“I,” she said, and retched dryly. She licked her lips. “We.”

“I can’t help you,” said Hornwrack.

The insect, he saw, was damaged. The raised and elongated prothorax from which issued its frail forelimbs was covered in cuts and gouges, some of them deep enough to reveal the whitish stored fat beneath. Crusted secretions rimmed its unearthly eyes. From time to time it scraped aimlessly in the ashes at its feet or beat wildly its filmy wings.

“We see your world,” said the madwoman. “Killing is all dead world. World killed. We are all killed here.”

Her voice was flat and mournful. It seemed to come from a huge distance away. In the pauses between the words Hornwrack himself became an insect. He flew through the great derelict spaces, shaken by compulsions he did not understand. Many others were there with him. A hunger drove them, presiding and unproductive. They fell into a choking air and were consumed.

“We now press your heads. Our words are pressing your heads. Your world presses us. Oh. Gah.”

The creature flailed its forelimbs against the ground until one of them fell off.

“Gah,” said Fay Glass. “Help. Oh.”

Hornwrack rushed forward and tried to haul her from under the clattering mandibles. She would not come. He felt the huge triangular mask dip toward him. He shouted and ran away again, slashing out blindly with his knife. Tomb the Dwarf came out of the maze and touched his elbow. They both ran forward and this time pulled her out. The dwarf lost his hat. “I. We. Oh,” whined Fay Glass, while the insect’s nervous system underwent some fresh deterioration, causing it to writhe, fan the air, and curl its abdomen repeatedly over its head. These spasms were replaced by a curious immobility, which in turn affected the madwoman. She lay on the floor like a pupating grub, the ends of her fingers bleeding where she had bitten them. The insect looked like a great enamelled brooch dug up from some depraved old city. Hornwrack and the dwarf watched it warily. It stared back, its eyes enigmatic, crusted. A faint smell of lemons hung about it, and behind that, rotting cabbage.

“It sees us,” whispered Tomb. He licked his lips. “What did she say?” Then: “Can it see us?”

Hornwrack was too out of breath to speak.

The Reborn Men do not think as we do, but live—pursued by an incomprehensible past—among distempered waking dreams. Alstath Fulthor wandered into the centre of the maze from quite another entrance, his gait stilted. He stared at the insect in astonishment, flung a hand up in front of his face; a long groan came out of his mouth. He looked like some exotic mantis in his blood-red armour. Attracted perhaps by this, the insect turned with a
clack clack
of coxal joints to face him. (Hornwrack and the dwarf were now able to see the curious markings on its abdomen, the three black diagonal bars or fascia running across each wing.) He walked round it, groaning, his head working as if his neck contained bent clockwork. Plainly he thought he was in a dream of the Afternoon, for he murmured to himself of Arnac san Tehn and the “Yellow Gardens.” Now they faced one another again, and if Fulthor looked like an insect, then the thing before him with its hacked yellow prothorax resembled an armoured man. Fulthor glanced down at the energy blade spitting and fizzing in his hand. He hit the insect across the head with it, bursting an eye, cutting into the thorax, and shearing off one of its legs.