Viriconium (64 page)

At noon the trees thinned out a little.

It was bitterly cold. In the pale, slanting winter light the east wind coated everything in a transparent skin more flexible than ice but nothing like air. For thirty minutes they were able to travel along an old, abandoned road. It was foundering in the soft ground. The shadows of the trees fell distinct but washed-out across its white, tilted surface. “Who would want to make a road in a place like this?” The cold had locked up the moisture in everything—mud, stone, vegetation—so that it looked like bone and they were glad to get under the canopy again.

The horses were intractable. Disoriented by the prawn-coloured “sky,” they would refuse to move, bracing their legs and trembling, then turn rolling white eyes on Dissolution Kahn who, dismounting, swore and sank to his boot-tops in the slime, releasing from it enormous acrid bubbles. By the middle of the short winter afternoon they had lost one of the ponies to quicksand. The other died after drinking from a clear pool, rapid swelling of its limbs followed by gushes of blood from the corroded glands and internal organs. Rotgob was able to save one of the loads. The other, which contained food, was lost.

Over all this presided the smell of corrupt metal. tegeus-Cromis’s mouth was coated with bitter deposits; he felt poisoned, and found it difficult to speak. Though he had always known what to expect, he seemed numb for much of the day, gazing automatically at whatever presented itself to his eyes while he allowed his horse to stumble and slither about beneath him. He had slipped into a reverie in which he saw himself riding over sunny cobbles into a courtyard somewhere in the cisPontine Quarter, entry to which was gained by a narrow brick arch. It was familiar to him, though at the same time he could not remember having been there before. Fish was being sold from a cart at one end of the square; at the other rose the dark bulk of “Our Lady of the Zincsmiths”: children ran excitedly from one to the other in the sunshine, squabbling over a bit of pavement marked out for a hopping game, “blind Michael.” As the prince’s horse clattered under the arch he heard a woman’s voice singing to a mandolin, and the air was full of the smells of cod and saffron.

Suddenly aware of the blood and its unbearable heritage, he jerked awake and said:

“We must get on!”

The dwarf looked at him compassionately. It was evening. They were tired and filthy. They had long ago lost the animal’s spoor.

They reached a place called on some of the prince’s maps Cobaltmere and on others Sour Pent Lay or Pent Lay. “In this case we should read
lay
as
lake,
” he told them. There they lit a fire and camped uncomfortably. “My guts have felt bad since we got in here,” Dissolution Kahn admitted. “It’s lucky there isn’t much to eat.” He and the dwarf were staring out across the lay. On its shallow waters could be seen mats of a kind of tuberous, buoyant vegetation which in the horizontal light of sunset had come alive briefly with mile-long stains of mazarine and cochineal; bits of it were drifting ashore all the time, rubbery and dull-looking. Along the far banks were lines of shadowy knots and hummocks covered with a damp growth, like heaps of spoil on an abandoned quarry terrace. It was easy to see that they fascinated the dwarf, who said several times wonderingly:

“Those were buildings. This marsh was once a city.”

“I know of one map that marks it as such,” the prince told him, “though I have never been shown it. Some authorities agree, but we regard them as speculative. The majority have it as a natural formation, and on the bank there record ‘blocks of stone.’ ”

The dwarf could not accept this.

“It was a city once,” he said with quiet emphasis.

Suddenly he jumped to his feet and pinched the bridge of his nose in imitation of the clairvoyants of Margery Fry Court.

“I see it clearly in its heyday,” he exclaimed. “It was the Uriconium of the North! I call it antiVriko, and reclaim it in the name of Mammy Morgante, Queen of every empire of the earth!” He made a grand gesture with his arms and a fanfaring, farting sound with his mouth. “I encompass it on behalf of all my subjects—even this one.”

“You can take the first watch, then.”

An even, curious light came up from Cobaltmere once the sun had set. It had a veiling effect. The fire seemed orange and remote. Everything else had a soapy look, a colouration which made the prince imagine that if he touched the dwarf or his companion they would have the texture of grey soap. Yet it was bright enough to write by: his pen’s shadow preceded it across the page. “
The wren,
” he quoted, “
may then be hung by its leg in the
centre of two hoops crossing each other at right angles.
” If he died it was hoped one of the others would take his notes back to the city to be added to the library of his House; there they would be catalogued.

“I’ll take all the watches,” said Rotgob. “Only some peasant would sleep, here in the Jewel of the Northern Marsh!”

He insisted on this and thereafter they would see him at intervals as they talked, moving slowly round the clearing in and out of their field of vision, humming and murmuring to himself or stopping to listen to the sound of water draining through the reedbeds. “We can only cast about for sign.” “I think we are halfway down the southern shore.” They could decide nothing. Dissolution Kahn fell asleep abruptly, to grunt and belch in his dreams. In the end tegeus-Cromis slept too: only to be woken sometime before dawn by the cold. He moved nearer the embers of the fire and lay there uneasily with his fingers laced beneath his head. The dwarf was still happy at that time. You could hear him yawn, rub his hands together, reassure the horses. Once he said softly but clearly, “It was a city,” and gave a deep sigh.

In the morning they found him curled up with his knees thrust hard into his chest and his arms clasped round them. He had already sunk slightly into the mud. There was an expression of misery and loneliness on his face. He was shivering helplessly: for some reason he had felt compelled to tear off his clothes and throw them about. All they could get him to say was something that sounded like “Filth, filth.” All at once he ran off and tried to jump into the mere; though he only managed to land with his face in it he was dead before they could pull him out.

“Be steady,” said Dissolution Kahn. “There are still two of us.”

Later he picked up the dwarf’s short sword. “People were always offering him money for the sheath of this,” he said. He studied it. “It’s made of a horse’s tosser, I think. They do that down in the South.”

He dug a deep hole in the mud and put the dwarf in it.

“This little chap was one of the best fighters you ever saw. He was so quick.”

He swallowed and stared away across the mere.

“Morgante!” he said. “Morgante!” And: “He must have been poisoned. He must have drunk the water or eaten something, to kill himself like that.”

Dawn had hardly warmed the air. Now brittle flakes of snow came down, reluctantly at first and then with more vigour until Cobaltmere was obscured and the marsh around it began to look like the ornamental gardens of Harden Bosch seen through a net curtain in Montrouge. If you concentrated for a moment on the flakes that made up any part of the curtain they would seem to fall slowly, or even to be suspended: then, with the movement of flies in an empty room in summer, whirl round one another in a sudden intricate spiral before they shot apart as if a string connecting them had been cut. In this way they whirled down on the shore of the lake; they whirled down on the face of the dwarf. The prince, huddled in his cloak, touched the turned earth with his foot. He pushed some of it into the hole.

“It was the animal,” he said. “I recognise the signs.”

“He killed himself,” repeated Dissolution Kahn stubbornly. “How could an animal kill him when he killed himself?”

“I recognise the signs.”

They went on pushing earth into the hole until they could tread it down.

“Well, there are still two of us.”

“I first learned about the Lamia when I was six years old,” said tegeus-Cromis. “There was a musical noise in the night. They explained it to me and then I knew. . . . History’s against us,” he said, “and I should have come alone.”

“We’re here now.”

The prince was easily able to identify fresh sign. They followed it and, not far from the lay, near the northern edge of the marsh, discovered an old tower. Around it the vegetation was returning to normal. Filaments of ordinary ivy crawled over the fawn stone; from cracks near the summit grew a withered bullace, its rattling branches occupied by small stealthy birds; hawthorn and elder lapped up against its base. “Books hint at the existence of a sinking tower, though they place it in the East.” The prince urged his horse forward. Birds flew out of the hawthorn. He drew his sword. “I am afraid to approach too openly.”

The tower, it quickly became clear, had embedded itself so far in the ground that its lower windows were rectangular slits twelve or eighteen inches high. “You won’t get in there,” said Dissolution Kahn. From one of them issued a smell that made him retch. He went a little nearer and sized it up, breathing heavily through his mouth, while snow eddied round his heavy, motionless figure. Eventually he shook his head and repeated,

“You won’t get through there. Neither of us will. It’s too small.”

The prince thought he could crawl through. “I am thinner than you, and perhaps if I take my cloak off that will make things easier.”

“You’re mad if you go in there alone.”

“What choice have I?”

“You know I would go in if I could!”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

The prince threw his cloak over the hindquarters of his horse, then turned and walked as fast as he could to the sunken window. “No one has been here for a hundred years,” he whispered to himself. When he looked back through the plaiting snow he could see Dissolution Kahn gazing after him in a hurt way. He wanted to say something else, but sensing the Lamia so close to him now, and perhaps finding himself glad to take the responsibility for it after all, only managed to shout,

“Go home! I should never have brought you!”

To keep the Kahn from replying, he got down on his hands and knees and put his face into the queer mixture of smells bellying from the slot. He coughed; his eyes watered; against his will he hung back. He heard the Kahn call out from a long way off—but ashamed, and anyway unable to make sense of the words, thrust his head suddenly into the hole. Trying to keep his sword pointed in front of him, he wriggled desperately through. It was dark. When he stood up he hit his head on something; he didn’t think it was the ceiling. Crouching awkwardly he began to stumble about in the dark, swinging out with his sword in all directions. This was how he had always expected to meet the animal. Something cold dripped into his hair and down his cheek. His feet slid on a soft and rotten surface; he fell; the sword flew out of his hand and struck blue sparks from a wall.

He got up slowly and stood there in the dark. “Kill me, then,” he said. “I won’t stop you now.” His own voice sounded dull and artificial to him. After a minute, perhaps two, when nothing had happened, he took out the piece of candle he had been taught to use for diagnosis and lit it. He stared in horror at its flame for a few seconds, then flung it down with a sob. The lair, if it was one at all, was empty.

“I didn’t ask for this,” tegeus-Cromis said. It was something he had often repeated to himself when he was a child. He saw himself reading books, learning these ways to recognise the Beast.

Groping about in the emptiness for his sword, he clasped its blade and cut the palm of his hand. He squirmed backwards through the foundered window and out into the snow, where he took a few uncertain steps, looking for the horses. They were gone. He stared at the blood running down his sword. He ran three times round the tower, crying out. Three of his fingers hung useless. He bound up the wound so he wouldn’t have to see it. Bent forward against the weather, he picked up in the slush two sets of hoofprints leading back towards Sour Pent Lay. If I hurry, he thought, I can still catch up with him. Or he may come back to look for me.

At Cobaltmere he had glimpses through the snow of long vacant mudbanks and reefs. His horse he found lying with its neck stretched out and its head in the water. His cloak was still wrapped round its hindquarters. Its body was swollen; blood oozed from its mouth and anus. The veins in its eyes were yellow.

He was looking down at it puzzledly when he heard a faint cry further along the shore.

There Dissolution Kahn sat on his great horse. She was slow to settle but full of good points—had a shoulder, he often pointed out, like the half side of a house. She arched her neck and shook her big raw head. Her bridle, which was of soft red leather—would he go heavily on her mouth with a pair of hands like his, delicate as a woman’s?—was inlaid with metal filigree; her breath steamed in the cold air. The Kahn had put on his ring mail, which he had had lacquered deep blue for him some weeks before in the Tinmarket; and over that, with care to keep it spotless, a silk surcoat the same acid yellow as the mare’s caparisons. He loved those colours. His hair blew back in the wind like a pennant. High above his head he brandished a sword with silver hilts. To the prince, who had lived for so long in a world of sign, it seemed for a moment that the marsh could not contain them: they were transformed into their own emblem and thus made invincible. But it was an effect of the light, and passed, and he saw that they looked quite small in front of the Beast of the Sixth House.