Viriconium (60 page)

All the offices were the same. From a brass voice pipe Ashlyme thought he heard a whisper, but when he spoke into it there was no answer, only a long echoic sigh. He knew that he was now in the country the dwarf had spoken of so often.
Intrigue and backstabbing and great flies in everything
you eat.
Ashlyme wiped his hand over his face: if he wasn’t careful, he knew, he could be caught there forever. It was a country that accompanied the dwarf wherever he went; it was an atmosphere that surrounded him, miasmic and pervasive, like the smell of Altaean Balm; he had brought it with him, down from the North or the sky, and visited it on the city.
Two
thousand men were thrown into fires in one day. Those people had abandoned
themselves to conspiracy
.

Flies rose in clouds as Ashlyme made his way into the older places of the tower. Even there, dead men lay facedown among the orange peel and other rubbish in the gloomy carmine-lit passageways. They had daubed slogans on the walls in their own fluids as they waited to die—
Up the
North, Ya bas, Go back, yellows
—their motives so tribal as to be indistinguishable from motivelessness.
We are the boys from the second floor!

A fly settled on his wrist. Its wings were long and papery, and it seemed to have more legs than any fly he had seen in Viriconium. He shuddered and threw it off. Its eyes glittered at him.

Eventually he found his way into the Grand Cairo’s suite, where for a week or more the dwarf, afraid of the plague, afraid of the Barley brothers and their informants who by now knew almost everything, afraid most of all of his own disintegrating gang, had forbidden anyone to enter. The rooms were dirty and cold, and he had allowed his cats (who, he said, were the only creatures you could trust in this life) the run of them. Just inside the door a servant was sprawled. He had been there for some days. Someone had passed a piece of stiff wire through his head from one ear to the other. A thick sour smell rose from the polished floor, where the cats had dragged chop bones and pies from among the broken crockery on the tray he had been carrying and dipped their unfastidious little tongues in the long sticky spill of “housemaid’s coffee.” Ashlyme went to open the windows.

When he looked out, expecting to see the High City stretching away in the moonlight, he discovered that he was staring instead across the bleak watersheds of some high plateau in the North. Rain streamed over it from a leaden sky, washing away at the aimless muddy paths which wound between the foundering cairns and ruined factories. He heard a noise like the far-off ringing of a bell. At this a few small figures appeared, ran this way and that in the mud, and then lay down. A poisonous metallic smell came up into the room. Ashlyme drew in his breath quickly, shut the windows, and turned away.

Two or three cats had run in off the balcony outside, and now accompanied him purring into the
salle
or side chamber.

White dustcloth hung off the walls in great swathes; underfoot was a muck of chewed bones, bits of cake, and fruit peel, among which Ashlyme saw books, squares of paper covered with designs half-Gnostic, half-obscene, and—to his horror—two small canvases of Audsley King’s: “Making a chair in the Vitelotte Quarter” and an early gouache of “The great arch beneath the Hidden Gate,” the latter slashed and daubed beyond repair. In a corner with some hanks of hair and a rusty spade lay the sheep’s head which had been the centrepiece of the dwarf’s banqueting table on the night he had made Fat Mam Etteilla read his future. He had flung it there in some fit of rage or pique, and now, one withered orange still stuck in its left eye socket, it stared cynically up into the blackened vault of the original room, the rafters of which had received to themselves during the Afternoon Cultures a millennium of strange smokes and incenses.

At the centre of all this stood the Grand Cairo, surrounded by a circle of shrouded furniture.

He had on dark green stockings, and a jerkin made all of green leather lozenges; on his head was a straw hat with a wide brim and a low, rounded crown, surmounted by bunches of owl feathers, ears of corn, and varnished gooseberries. Whatever he had once been, he now seemed to Ashlyme like an ancient, impudent child. In one hand he held tight to something Ashlyme couldn’t quite see; while with the other he clutched the big, work-reddened fingers of the Fat Mam, who cast on him an indulgent, matronly glance. In the Plaza of Unrealised Time she had been known by a voluminous yellow satin gown: she was wearing it now. Ribbons of the same colour were tied loosely about her powerful upper arms, and on her head she bore a wreath of sol d’or.

At their feet she had arranged the five surviving cards of the fortune-telling pack which Ashlyme had pulled from the bonfire of elder boughs and old letters in the walled garden of Audsley King:

DEPOUILLEMENT
(Loss)
—A bleak foreshore. Creatures of the deep float half submerged in the ebb tide. The sky is full of owls.

THE LILYWHITE BOYS, “Lords of Illusionary Success”—Some pale children jump back and forth like frogs across a fire of sea holly and yew.

THE CITY
(Nothingness)
—A dog between two towers.

THE LORD OF THE FIRST OPERATION—In this card a monkey in a red jacket directs with his wand the antics of a man and a rat.

ECLAIRCISSEMENT (
Enlightenment,
or “The Hermetic Feast”)—The doctor of this mystery lies beneath the sea. In one hand he holds a spray of rose hips, in the other a bell.

“What are you doing?” asked Ashlyme in a whisper.

The dwarf gave him a coy smile, then moved his free hand slightly, so as to show him a cake of soap filled with broken razor blades.

“Wait!” cried Ashlyme. Something appalling was going to happen. He flung himself across the room, shouting, “What about Audsley King?”

The fortune-teller raised her hand. The dwarf winked. Out of the tarot cards on the floor came an intense coloured flare of light, as if they had been illuminated suddenly from behind. Ashlyme felt it flash across his face, green and yellow, scarlet and deep blue, like light from a melting stained-glass window. There was an unbearable
newness
to it as it scoured that ancient room. Ashlyme staggered back.

“Wait!” he cried, flinging up his arm in front of his eyes, but not before he had seen the dwarf and fortune-teller begin to shrink, blasted and shrivelled by that curious glare into bundles of hair and paper ribbon which whirled faster and faster round the floor like rubbish on a windy street corner, until they toppled over suddenly and fell down into the cards with a faint cry.

The room was filled with a white effulgence so intense that he could see, through eyelid and muscle tissue, the bones of his forearm. He groaned and fell heavily on the floor.

When he was able to open his eyes again, he was alone with the cards. They had been scattered and and charred by the force of the light which still radiated from them into every corner of the room. He knelt and collected them together, hissing and blowing on the tips of his fingers. He thought he could see two new figures running between the towers of the card called THE CITY. “Wait!” he whispered, demented with fear and frustration. The light died as abruptly as it had come.

The death and defection of his only allies left him alone in a place he hardly recognised. In one night the plague zone had extended its boundaries by two miles, perhaps three. The High City had succumbed at last. Later he was to write:

A quiet shabbiness seemed to have descended unnoticed on the squares and
avenues. Waste paper blew round my legs as I crossed the empty perspectives of
the Atteline Way; the bowls of the everlasting fountains at Delpine Square
were dry and dust-filled, the flagstones slippery with birdlime underfoot; insectscircled and fell in the orange lamplight along the Camine Auriale. The
plague had penetrated everywhere. All evening the salons and drawing rooms
of the High City had been haunted by silences, pauses
, faux pas:
if anyone
heard me when I flung myself exhausted against some well-known front door
to get my breath it was only as another intrusion, a harsh, lonely sound which
relieved briefly the stultified conversation, the unending dinner with its lukewarm
sauces and overcooked mutton, or the curiously flat tone of the visiting
violinist (who subsequently shook his instrument and complained, “I find the
ambience rather
unsympathetic
tonight.”)

This psychological disorder of the city was reflected in a new disorder of its
streets. It was a city I knew and yet I could not find my way about it. Avenue
turned into endless avenue. Alleys turned back on themselves. The familiar
roads repeated themselves infinitely in rows of dusty chestnut trees and iron
railings. If I found my way in the gardens of the Haadenbosk, I lost it again
on the Pont des Arts, and ended up looking at my own reflection dissolving in
the oily water below. Though the events I had witnessed in the Grand Cairo’s
tower had numbed it a little, the grief and shame I felt over my friend’s death
was still strong. I struggled too with a rapidly growing fear for the safety of
Audsley King. Everyone had deserted her but me. In this way I came eventually—by luck or destiny—to the top of the Gabelline Stairs.

Here he encountered the Barley brothers, Gog and Matey, who came reeling up from the Low City towards him with their arms full of bottles. They had been spitting on the floor all night at Agden Fincher’s pie shop. As soon as they saw Ashlyme bearing down on them they gave him queasy grins and reeled off the way they had come, pushing and shoving one another guiltily and whispering, “Blimey, it’s the vicar!”

But at the bottom of the stairs, near that small iron gate through which Ashlyme would have to pass if he wanted to enter the Low City, they seemed to falter suddenly. They stood in his way, sniffing and hawking and wiping their noses on the backs of their hands.

“Let me through that gate!” panted Ashlyme. “Do you think I want to waste my time with you? Because of you one of my friends is already dead!”

They stared, embarrassed, at the floor.

“Look here, yer honour,” said Matey. “We didn’t know it was Sunday. Sorry.”

As he spoke he furtively used the sole of one turned-down Wellington boot to scrape the foetid clay off the uppers of the other. His brother tried to tidy him up—tugging at his neckerchief, brushing vainly at the mud, fish slime, and rats’ blood congealing on his jacket. A horrible smell came up from him. He looked bashfully away and began to hum,

“Ousted out of Butlins, Bilston, and Mexborough,
Those bold Barley brothers,
Lords of the Left Hand Thread.”

“Are you mad?” demanded Ashlyme.

“We’ve had no supper,” said Gog. He spat on his hand and plastered down his brother’s reeking hair.

Ashlyme thought of Emmet Buffo, who all his life had achieved nothing but ridicule, and who now lay quiet and unshaven, surrounded by pale flames, in the iron bed up at Alves. He thought of Audsley King coughing up blood in the overcast light of the deserted studio above the Rue Serpolet. He thought of Paulinus Rack’s greed, the trivial lives of Livio Fognet and Angina Desformes, the frustrated intelligence of the Marchioness “L,” which had trickled away into scandal and “art.”

“If you are indeed the gods of this place,” he said, “you have done it nothing but harm.” He made a gesture which encompassed the whole city. “Don’t you see?” he appealed. “When you came down from the sky you failed us all. I have lost count of the times when you have been dragged spewing and helpless from the Pleasure Canal! It is not the behaviour of gods or princes. And while you occupy yourselves thus, you condemn us all to waste and mediocrity, madness and disorder, misery and an early death!”

He stared into their big sheepish blue eyes.

“Is this what you want? If you do, you have become worthless, and we are better off without you!”

To begin with the Barley brothers made a great show of paying attention to this speech. A nod was as good as a wink to them, implied the one; while by means of agitated grimaces, groans, and shrugs, the other tried to convey that he too knew when things had got out of hand. Easily bored, though, they were soon trying to put Ashlyme off—imitating his facial expressions, spluttering and sniggering at unfortunate turns of phrase, pushing one another furtively when they thought he wasn’t looking. In the end, even as he was urging them, “Go back to your proper place in the sky before it is too late!” they eyed each other slyly and let fall a resounding succession of belches and farts.

“Gor!” cried Matey. “What a roaster!”

“Hang on! Hang on!” warned his brother. “Here comes another one!”

A foul smell drifted up the Gabelline Stairs.

Ashlyme bit his lip. Suddenly there welled up in him all the misery he had felt since his failure to rescue Audsley King. With an incoherent shout he flung himself at his tormentors, clutching at their coats and punching out blindly. Overcome with farts and helpless laughter they staggered back away from him. He heard himself sobbing with frustration. “You filthy stupid boys!” he wept. He plucked at their arms and tried to twist his fingers in their stubbly hair; he kicked their shins, which only made them laugh more loudly. He didn’t know how to hurt them. Then he remembered the little knife the dwarf had given him. Panting and shaking, he tugged it from his pocket and held it out in front of him.