Viriconium (62 page)

“Old man? I cannot stay for long . . .”

Wrinkling his nose, he turned over some of the rags on the floor. Among them he found a bit of heavily worked tapestry which he thought might do as a curtain. He unfolded it nervously, having learned his lesson from the last one he had picked up. It was stained yet luminous; it had been splendid once. It showed a man in the extreme yellow of age, as bald as an egg, walking between two huge buildings. The road under his feet was carpeted with the crushed husks of insects, and a shadowy figure accompanied him on his left side, a child or a dwarf mounted on a donkey. This figure, its face partly obscured by dirt, fascinated Ashlyme. He lifted the tapestry to the light so that he could see it better.

As he did so there came a loud clatter of wings from the room upstairs. Suddenly the shop seemed to be full of shadows.

A large bird had flown in through an open window,
he wrote later in his journal.
I thought I heard a reedy voice speak indistinctly in the gloom. I put
the tapestry down and walked quickly out into the sunshine.

THE LAMIA &
LORD CROMIS

THE LAMIA &
LORD CROMIS

The apologists or historians of the city—Verdigris, Kubin, Saent Saar— tended to describe it at that time in terms of its emblems and emblematic contradictions.
An ace in the gutter, a leopard made of flowers,
says Verdigris in
Some Remarks to My Dog,
hoping to suggest a whole comprised of hints, causal lacunae, reversing hierarchies:
Where the city is at its
emptiest we find ourselves full.

For Saent Saar, comfortable under the patronage of a marchioness, this was more than enough. Less desperate perhaps, and more aware of a kind of slippage in the city’s perception of itself, certainly more conscious of his responsibilities, he has it that
we see in her very failures of sense a twinning
of contingency and the urge to form. The city is inventing herself, in locutions
partial and accidental, like a woman rehearsing the contents of an old letter.
She lost it long ago. She may even have forgotten who it came from. If she were
to see it now, its careful phrases would surprise her by their lack of resemblance
to what she has made of them.

Such a view, as acceptable to the Artists’ Quarter as to Mynned, would have been regarded in the provinces with fear. There they looked to the capital, which they called “Uriconium,” “Vriko,” or sometimes “the Jewel on the Edge of the Western Sea,” for stability. One of its minor princes learned the irony of this at first hand. His name was tegeus-Cromis.

He arrived at Duirinish—then a thriving fish-and-wool town on the coast a hundred miles north of the city—towards the end of December, and after making enquiries at a secondhand bookshop and a taxidermist’s, went in the evening to the Blue Metal Discovery, where he sat down in the long smoky parlour at a table some way from the fire. It turned out that he had come by horse, through the Monar passes, which at that time of the year were beginning to be icy and difficult. One or two of his fellow customers knew this; they shook their heads admiringly. One or two more, who thought they knew why he had come, watched him circumspectly while the wind drove sleet across the bleak cobbles of Replica Square. The rest—rentiers, small landowners from the Low Leedale, coming men in the fur and metal trade—watched him simply because he was a minor prince and they had never seen one before.

It had been a raw afternoon and he looked cold. Otherwise it was hard to know what to make of him. He wore a sword but carried a book
(The
Hunting of the Jolly Wren)
. While he walked quickly and energetically, like a young man, when you got close you saw he was grey-haired and preoccupied, and for a moment this was unnerving. In the end they would have put it that though the steel rings on his fingers were bulky, aristocratic, cut into the very complex seals of his House, his boots were a bit cheap and dirty. They wouldn’t have expected a prince’s boots to be like that.

They asked him would he come nearer the fire. There was plenty of room!

But if he struck them as lonely, even diffident, he was also as perfectly unresponsive as only a minor prince can be. They were interested in him, but he was not so interested in them; they soon left him to himself, tall and polite in a heavy bice velvet cloak. Evening wore into night and he smiled faintly at the remains of his meal. He seemed to be waiting for someone.

(He was thinking: Last December I watched the early snow fall in the High City. That morning, when it looked as if the weather would improve, I sat in the Charcuterie Vivien hoping the sun would come out. Someone I had been expecting arrived, or spoke, or smiled. We were to go skating the next day if it froze. Moments like this seemed permanent but they cannot be repaired; I cannot now regenerate them. And that is not to go back very far.)

Just after midnight a boy came down from the upper rooms of the inn and began to go round from group to group in the parlour, laughing and talking animatedly. Little notice was taken of him. As far as the prince could tell he was trying to collect money—a strange, graceless-looking child fourteen or fifteen years old, who could reach out very quickly and catch a moth in one hand, then release it unharmed. Every lamp had ten or a dozen of these creatures, with their dark green and purple wings, circling it frantically: the boy was able to perform his trick again and again. At the fire they affected not to see him, though he caught a moth for each of them. They seemed uncomfortable.

“Well,” said the boy loudly at last. “No one born today will ever be drowned or hanged, that’s something.”

Though he didn’t understand the joke of this, the prince found himself laughing. A moment later the boy came over to speak to him.

“Look, watch the moth.”

“You don’t seem to have had much luck over there,” said tegeus-Cromis when he had examined the insect; he found that he could catch it quite easily, but not without breaking its wings. “Still, they’re a careful lot in the fur and metal trade.”

The boy looked at him oddly, then he laughed too.

“Oh, they all know me,” he said. “They all know me, my lord.”

He sat down.

“I was waiting for someone, but not for you,” tegeus-Cromis told him. “Do I pay you for my moth?”

“You rode over the passes on some old nag,” said the boy. “I heard.”

He put his hand to his mouth. “Did that sound awful? I always say something like that, I don’t know why. Do you ever say something you don’t mean like that? I expect it’s a beautiful horse, isn’t it, probably a thoroughbred, and now you’re hurt. I’m sorry.

“Look, here’s a live one: try again. Fast but not so rough. There! You’re getting the idea.” He shivered. “I was in Vriko once,” he said. “Artists’ Quarter. Phew! That’s no city for a lad like me. Six in the morning a smell so foul came up from the Yser Canal you thought it would rust the lamp-posts. Everything was filthy, but if we wanted a wash we had to go to the baths in Mosaic Lane. Do you know Mosaic Lane, my lord? They had some famous pictures there but you couldn’t see them for dirt; the boy I was with scratched it off and saw a face just like his own. Really. Sometimes the water isn’t like water at all; it smells of perished rubber.”

He stared ahead thoughtfully. His hair, very dark red and cut in a “coup sauvage” once popular in the Tinmarket, made his eyes seem very large and young. Ribbons of various colours were tied to his clothes. His throat was bare, the skin smooth and olive-coloured.

“We lived in a house near Ox Lip Lane.”

tegeus-Cromis laughed.

“It’s a long time since the Artists’ Quarter looked like that,” he said. “The Yser Spa fell into its own cistern; that was the end of the murals. There’s a courtyard there now with an apple tree in it, and Ox Lip Lane is all little shops which have tubs of geraniums outside them on the pavement. If you saw it now, I suppose, you’d love it.”

“Would I?” said the boy quietly. “I’d hate it. It would have no soul.”

“Soul!” said tegeus-Cromis, who had often thought the same thing. “I don’t believe you were ever there anyway. How old are you? Thirteen?”

They smiled at one another.

For a few minutes neither of them said anything. Then the prince, looking over the ruins of his dinner for some offer he could make, held out his pewter snuffbox. The boy shook his head slowly, but after some thought pulled apart a piece of bread and ate it. He drank some wine too, tilting back his head and gasping. Someone came up from the group round the fire, put a coin contemptuously on the table in front of him, and said, “Well then?” The boy shrugged. He got up and went into the middle of the parlour, recited rapidly three times, in a high voice devoid of expression or implication,

Johnny Jack all hung with rag dolls
Although he is small his family is great

and began to dance in a way which managed to be both clumsy and graceful. There was no music. His big wooden shoes thudded on the bare boards; he frowned with concentration and effort, breathing noisily through his mouth. The ribbons on his arms whirled in the lamplight, leaving coloured spiral afterimages. “The effect was quite touching,” tegeus-Cromis would say to him later: “But your arms are too thin.” There was no applause. When he had finished, the boy simply stood where he was until he had got his breath back, then went round the parlour again, catching moths, collecting money, laughing and chattering affectedly. It had not been an entertainment, the prince saw. Put out that the boy had not come straight back to his table, he opened his book and pretended to read:

“Make him a bed of earth bark, ewe daisy, five-finger blossom.”

He looked puzzledly at the cover of the book, put it down, and closed his eyes. He was tired. He saw quite clearly the great seracs collapsing up among the Monar icefields. He crossed under them, once, twice: again.

There was a red flush under the boy’s cheekbones when he did come back to the table, and he was still panting a little. “I’m older than that,” he said, as if they had never been interrupted. Then: “What have you come here for?”

tegeus-Cromis opened his eyes.

“What do they say by the fire?”

“To hunt. I knew that, too.” He leaned forward suddenly and took the prince’s hands between both of his own, which were warm and had a kind but papery touch. “Look, my dear,” he said, “why let it kill you, too?” He glanced round the room. The fire had burned down, the parlour was emptying, someone was collecting the empty pots. A door opened towards the back and a smell of urine came in on a cold draught. He let go of the prince’s hands and made a gesture which encompassed not just the parlour, or the inn, but the cobbled square outside it, and the town beyond that. “It belongs here. It’s their responsibility. No one would want to see you killed.”

At this the prince caught his cloak a bit closer round him. “Some people are coming to help me,” he explained. “They should have been here by now. When the door opened, I thought that was them.”

Later the boy asked him: “Which House are you from?”

“The Sixth.”

“What’s your emblem?”

tegeus-Cromis showed him one of the rings he wore.

“The Lamia. Here. See?”

The boy shrugged.

“It doesn’t look like anything.”

In the end only the potboy was in the parlour to see them get up and leave together; the prince’s friends had been delayed.

The boy went in the night.

“You’ll always be able to find me,” he said.

In the morning the prince was woken by an altercation at the back of the inn. He had been given one of the rooms there as soon as he arrived. They were sought after because they were large, but this in itself made them seem cold and empty; and while they were supposed to be quieter than the rooms at the front, which faced Replica Square, they had the disadvantage of looking obliquely onto the stableyard. The stables, unlike the rest of the inn, were built of brick—a warm red kind more often seen in the South—and now stood bright and sharp under the blue winter sky. In the yard he could see, if he pressed one cheek against the glass and twisted his head to look out at an angle, two or three heavily laden ponies and a horse of some quality, short-coupled and powerful, with good “ends” and plenty of bone, about nineteen hands high. They were framed by an arch or passageway which further limited his vision, but which amplified the shouts and exclamations of the people gathered round them.

There had been a frost: it lay thickly on the setts in the corner of the yard the sun had not yet reached. The air was cold and transparent, giving to the scene—or that part of it the prince could see—a distinctness, a vigour, which amounted almost to gaiety. The big horse was plunging, striking out in a temper. It sent a bucket rolling across the cobbles, spilling water in a spiral in the morning light. Figures bobbed panickily under the animal’s hooves, trying to secure it; or lounged laughing and giving advice; or went hurriedly to and fro across the arch waving their arms, vanishing before he was able to identify them.

One of them was dressed in a meal-coloured cloak: did the horse belong to him? tegeus-Cromis knew it did, but now everything had vanished into his breath, which lay on the cold windowpane like the bloom on a grape. He wiped it off, then, growing tired of the uncomfortable position he had to maintain to see anything, tried to open the window. When it resisted he shrugged and went back into the room, barefoot across the chilly oak floor, to the things of his he had arranged on a table by the bed—the pewter snuffbox in need of a polish, his rings scattered like dice, one or two books. The sword, which had been his father’s, was propped in a corner. He dressed quickly, feeling elated for no reason.