Viriconium (56 page)

The Grand Cairo lost no chance to impress her. He turned this way and that to display his best profile. He stood with his spine arched and his chest thrust out and his hands tucked into the small of his back, looking up at her sideways to judge the effect he was having. He had dressed for the occasion in green velvet trousers tied up below the knee with red string, boots whose polished steel toecaps gave back a curved, bemusing reflection of the room at large, and a collarless shirt over which he wore unfastened a shiny black waistcoat. Round his neck he had a bit of green rag; and his hair had been slicked down with repeated applications of Altaean Balm, the powerful smell of which filled the room and mingled oddly with the scent of the may.

They made a strange pair, shuffling from exhibit to exhibit in the grey light. When he had shown her all his pieces of bone, his hair dolls, and blunt iron sickles twined with ribbon like convolvulus, he explained the meaning of each object and also where he had got it. This he had won at cards; that he had dug up in a desert; no value could be put on that one. He spoke coaxingly. “You can have any of these things. They are all very lucky.” But she was nervous and looked away. The Grand Cairo would not be downcast. He winked at Ashlyme with the vulgar gallantry of the secret policeman, as if to say, “I’m not finished by a long way yet!”

On a table he had a machine in a box. When he did something to it with his hands it produced a thin complaining music like the sound of a clarinet in the distance on a windy night, to which he tapped his feet and nodded his big head energetically, while he grinned round the room. But this only further confused the fortune-teller, and as soon as he saw that she would not dance, he shrugged and made haste to silence it. “We had a lot of those in the North,” he said.

“Look at this,” he invited her. “You can have this.” He stuck out his hand and made her look at the ring he had on it. “Inside here,” he boasted, “I carry the most deadly poison there is, made from the excrement of cats. I always wear this ring, even while I am asleep. And if it ever happened that I found myself in a position intolerable to my pride . . .”

He unscrewed the bezel of the ring. The fortune-teller stared expressionlessly down at the dull powder it contained.

“You can have that,” he said, snapping it shut.

She shook her head slowly in her bovine way. He smiled and looked directly into her eyes.

“Tell me my future, then,” he ordered.

The night was coming on. Fat Mam Etteilla sat resting her bosoms comfortably on the edge of the little green baize table, two dark patches of sweat spreading slowly under the arms of her dress. She shuffled the cards, spread them, and stared at them in surprise. The dwarf, looking over her shoulder, laughed loudly. He lit a lamp and sat down opposite her. “That’s something, eh?” he said. “What do you think of that?” Dull gold light flared off the grubby, colourful slips of pasteboard. He tilted his head to one side and considered them intently.

“Again!” he ordered. The fat woman went on staring at him. “Again!”

Ashlyme sat forgotten in a corner of the room. He had asked if he might go home, but the dwarf would not let him. “I might want you to take a message for me,” he said carelessly. The hot food cooled; the sheep’s head gazed into the gathering gloom with its bulging eyes; downstairs the dwarf’s police came and went, came and went, with their urgent reports from the Artists’ Quarter, their rumours from Cheminor, and their suspects from the Pont de Nile. None of this was interesting to the fortune-teller and her client. Only their two heads were visible, leaning avidly over the cards in the gold wash of light. Sometimes they set up a dull murmur: “Two rivers—a message!” “Avoid a meeting!” The room grew chilly. Ashlyme wrapped himself in his cloak and slept uncomfortably.

Later there was a quarrel; or perhaps he dreamed it. Someone knocked the table over in the dark. A stool scraped on the floor. A bottle fell and broke. Ashlyme heard the Fat Mam breathing heavily through her mouth, then the words,

“I am committed in the Rue Serpolet! What you ask is not yet possible!”

He had a confused impression of the cards spilling through the cold air the way a conjuror spills them from hand to hand, each small crude picture bright and cruel and alive and very far away.

When he next woke it was early dawn. If the table had been knocked over, they had righted it again and now sat with their elbows on it, looking first at the cards and then into one another’s eyes. The dwarf had disarranged his hair; it stood up in spikes, and beneath it his face was eroded and unhealthy. A half-eaten meal and a jug of “housemaid’s coffee” stood at the Fat Mam’s elbow, and there was dried milk in the hairs on her upper lip.

They seemed to be talking a language Ashlyme didn’t understand. He shook his head, cleared his throat, hoping they would notice him and become less remote. Fat Mam Etteilla gazed at him blankly for a second, an expression of greed fading from her features. The Grand Cairo got up and stretched. He walked over and pulled one of the oranges out of the sheep’s head, then went into the other room, peeling it. Ashlyme heard a muffled
oulouloulou
through the wall. A moment later the cats began to come in from Montrouge. They surrounded the card table, rubbing their heads against the fortune-teller’s ankles, more and more of them until the room was full of their drugged purr.

“None of these cats is mine,” the dwarf told her proudly, finishing his orange. “They come to me from all over the city because I speak their language. What do you think of that?”

She smoothed her hair complacently.

“Very nice,” she said.

Ashlyme left them and walked stiffly out into the city, where the thin milky light of dawn was falling across the earthworks and onto the faces of the dwarf’s raw new buildings. When he looked back the tower was dark but for a single yellow window, against which he could make out two silhouetted figures. He rubbed his eyes.

THE FOURTH CARD

THE LORD OF THE FIRST OPERATION

Chaos and uncertainty follow this card. A journey or undertaking of which the outcome cannot be guessed. According to another reading, vacillation.

“I have heard the café philosophers say, ‘The world is so old that the substance of
reality no longer knows what it ought to be.’ ”

ANSEL VERDIGRIS,
Some Remarks to my Dog

If you stood at the window in the studio at Mynned and looked out towards the Low City, you felt that Time was dammed up and spreading out quietly all around you like a stagnant pond. The sky was the colour of zinc.

Ashlyme pursued his life dully, unsure what he might have begun by bringing the dwarf and the fortune-teller together. One night he dreamed he was standing in a gallery which overlooked the ground floor of a large building.
The whole of this floor,
he recorded,
was given over to piles of secondhandclothes, among which wandered hundreds of elderly women with
powdered cheeks and wet angry eyes. They turned the clothes over busily: they
looked like beetles in their black coats
. Then the Barley brothers had come in, accompanied by the Grand Cairo, who immediately began giving away coloured balloons.
There weren’t enough to go round. The women fought
over them in the aisles, running over one another furiously, red in the face. I
woke up sweating: it was just like being in Hell.

The popularity of his portraits persisted, but he found his clients distracted and hard to pose.
For the moment,
he wrote,
they are a little subdued.It will pass. They find themselves chafed by their isolation. They say it is
like living on an island, and I suppose they are right.

Something new, in the shape of Paulinus Rack and his difficulties, soon came to take their mind off their predicament.
I have heard,
Ashlyme noted, not without satisfaction,
that he has made unwise property investmentsin the Low City.
If Die Traumunden Knaben
is not a success, he will
crash, and his patrons will disown him. Yet they constantly interfere with the
production, demanding that it be made “more acceptable.” They must have
sets designed by Audsley King, but they do not want the ones that have already
been submitted. These are, it appears, “too gloomy”; they are “drab”; they are
at one and the same time “too suggestive” and “too blatant.” Rack is driven
to dining alone at the Charcuterie Vivien (where he does not speak to me).
Meanwhile, somebody has suggested we have a play about the Barley brothers.

He viewed this with some distaste.

These great fools occupy our minds enough as it is. Nightly they are staggeringalong the Mynned gutters, gaping at the stars through the branches of the
trees. Must we have them paraded in front of us at the Prospekt Theatre, as
well, their pockets full of clinking bottles, followed onto the stage by half a
dozen barking Dandy Dinmont dogs they have bought from some trader in
Line Mass who claims to have trained them on Stockholm Tar and live cats?

And later he added:

The Grand Cairo seems to fear them more than ever. “Their ears are everywhere!” he claims, and has sent out orders to increase the vigilance of his own
spies. He visits my studio in the early hours and sits down cross-legged in the
only good chair, as full of his own importance as ever and heavy with secrets he
cannot wait to divulge—the plague zone has shifted again, fifteen people will
be arrested at Alves tomorrow for trying to smuggle relatives out, and so forth.
But his conspiracies are not going well. He is bilious, quarrelsome, insecure. If
he hears a door slam in the distance he gives a guilty start, then tries to pass it
off by laughing sarcastically or flying into a rage. He drinks black-currant
gin without stopping; and as this stuff inflames his imagination his conversationturns less on how he will outwit his masters, and more and more on escape
from the city.

“Tell me, Ashlyme,” he sighs. “Will any of us ever get out of this trap we
have made for ourselves?” He never mentions the Fat Mam.

As the dwarf’s anxieties multiplied, he abandoned his visits to Mynned. But he would not have Ashlyme at the tower in Montrouge. Instead he arranged furtive meetings in Shrogg’s Dene, Cheminor, and the Haunted Gate, all the most squalid regions of the Low City, often to no more purpose than half an hour’s walk in the rain along some old fortification overgrown with willow herb, during which he would pick up and cast aside dozens of bits of leather, rusty saucepans, and other decaying domestic implements. One evening on his return from such an outing, Ashlyme found himself on Clavescin Crescent, a street whose name was not familiar to him.

He had come from a depopulated suburb a mile north of Cheminor, where muddy cinder paths lined with poplar trees wound among the empty lazar houses and crematoria. He had hoped to be at the foot of the Gabelline Stairs before darkness caught him: but it was already late, and a heavy blue twilight had set in, confusing him as to distances. He recognised the three-storey terraced houses, with their peeling fronts and cracked casement windows, as belonging to the Artists’ Quarter. Which part of it he wasn’t entirely sure, although he hoped he might be close to the familiar warren of streets behind Monstrance Avenue and the Plaza of Unrealised Time.

Little arched alleyways led off the crescent at intervals. He was hurrying past the mouth of one of them when he heard a low cry—not quite of pain, but not quite of anguish either.

This was such a strange sound to hear, even in the plague zone, that he stopped and peered into the alley. It was damp and unwelcoming, but it opened out after ten yards or so into a courtyard like a deep well, the sides of which were propped up by huge balks of timber. Night was already advanced there amid the builders’ rubble. At the foot of one bulging wall, under a heavily boarded window, bags of mortar stood in a line. Someone had fallen down among them. Ashlyme could see an indistinct figure supporting itself on its hands and knees. Unwilling to enter the alley, he called uncertainly, “Are you unwell?”

“Yes,” said a muffled voice. Then: “No.”

Ashlyme bit his lip. “Can you move this way?” he suggested.

Silence.

“I can only help you if you come out,” said Ashlyme.

A low chuckle came from behind one of the timber balks. Ashlyme said, “Is there someone else in there?” He strained his eyes to see into the courtyard. The man on the floor put his hands on his head and groaned suddenly. “Are you alone in there?” Ashlyme asked him.

The Barley brothers, who had spent all afternoon hunting rats in the overgrown gardens behind the crescent, were unable to keep quiet any longer.

“Nobody in here, yer honour,” said Matey in a sepulchral voice. They had never heard anything funnier. They stuffed their handkerchieves into their mouths and rolled about on the floor. They bolted from the shadows which had concealed them and, laughing helplessly, shouldered their way out of the alley. “What a frightful sight!” they shouted, and, “Give him some stick, vicar!” Their grinning faces bobbed over Ashlyme in the twilight like red balloons; they smelled strongly of ferrets and bottled beer. Hard-favoured little Dandy Dinmont dogs milled about between their hobnail-booted feet, yelping hysterically.