Viriconium

by M. John Harrison

  The man beneath the wolf’s head smiled.

  “There is a vitality in the North, Lord Cromis, that was lost to Viriconium when Methven died. She offered me an expanding culture in return for a dead one.”

  Cromis shook his head, and lifted the nameless sword.

  “Our old friendship means nothing to you?”

  “It will make you a little harder to kill, Lord Cromis.”

  “I am glad you admit to that. Perhaps it is harder for the betrayer than for the betrayed. Norvin Trinor, you are a turncoat and a fool.”

  With the jeers of the encircling Northmen in his ears, he kicked his horse forward.

  Trinor’s heavy blade swung at his head. He parried the stroke, but it had already shifted into a lateral motion which he was forced to evade by throwing himself half out of his saddle. Trinor chuckled, locked his foot under Cromis’s left stirrup in an effort to further unseat him. Cromis dropped his reins, took his sword in his left hand, and stuck it between the heaving ribs of the turncoat’s mount. Blood matting its coat, the animal swerved away, compelling Trinor to disengage.

  “You used to be the best sword in the empire, Lord Cromis,” he panted. “What happened to you?”

  “I am ill with treachery,” said Cromis, and he was. “It will pass.”

  They fought for five minutes, then ten, heedless of the greater conflict. It seemed to Cromis that the entire battle was summed up here, in a meeting of champions who had once been friends, and at each brief engagement, he grew more despairing.

  He saw Carron Ban’s hurt, disdainful face through the shining web of her traitor-husband’s blade, but it gave him no strength; he understood that she had felt pity for him that night in Viriconium, knowing that this confrontation must take place. He saw also that he was unable to match the hate she felt for Trinor: at each encounter, something slowed the nameless sword, and he was moved to pity rather than anger by the sneers of his opponent.

  But finally, his swordsmanship told, and in a queer way: Trinor’s horse, which had been steadily losing blood from the wound in its side, fell abruptly to its knees in the disgusting mud. The turncoat kept his seat, but dropped his sword.

  He sat there, absolutely still, on the foundered animal. The Northmen groaned, and moved forward: the combat circle tightened like a noose.

  “You had better get on with it,” murmured Trinor. He shrugged. “The wolves will have you anyway, Lord Cromis-see how they close in!-and the Pastel City along with you. They are a hungry lot.

  “You had better get it over with.” tegeus-Cromis raised the nameless sword for the fatal stroke. He spat down into the face before him: but it was still the face of a friend. He shuddered with conflicting desires.

  He raised his eyes to the ring of Northmen who waited to take his blood in exchange for Trinor’s. He moaned with rage and frustration, but he could not drown out the voices of the past within him. “ Keep your bloody champion!” he cried. “Kill him yourself, for he’ll betray you, too!” And he turned his horse on its haunches, smashed into their astonished ranks like a storm from the desert, and howled away into the honest carnage of the battlefield as if the gates of Hell had opened behind him.

  A long time later, at the foot of the knoll in the centre of the valley, two Northern pikemen unhorsed him, and wondered briefly why he apologised as he rolled from his wrecked animal to kill them.

  “I could not kill him, Grif.”

  It was the second hour after dawn. A cold, peculiar light filtered through the low cloud base, greying the dead faces on the corpse heaps, striking mysterious reflections from their eyes. The wind keened in off the waste, stirring bloody hair and fallen pennants. Four wallowing Northern airboats hung beneath the clouds like omens seen in a dream. The entire valley was a sea of Northmen, washing black and implacable against one tiny eyot of resistance.

  Up on the knoll, Birkin Grif led perhaps two hundred of Waterbeck’s troops: all those who had not died or fled into the waste. A score of his own men still lived: their eyes were red-rimmed and sullen in worn, grimy faces. They stank of sweat and blood. They stared silently at one another and readied their notched and broken weapons for the last attack.

  “I could not do it.”

  Cromis had fought his way to the top of the hill on foot, aided by Tomb the Dwarf and a handful of the smugglers. The metal bird had led them to him, hovering above him as he fought with the men who had unhorsed him. (Now it perched on his arm, its head and talons covered with congealed blood, and said: “Fear the geteit chemosit -” It had said nothing else since he reached the knoll, and he did not care.) He was smeared with other men’s brains, suffering from a dozen minor wounds, and there was a pit of horrors in his head. He did not know how he had survived.

  “At least you are alive,” said Grif. His fat cheeks were sagging with weariness, and when he moved, he favoured his right leg, laid open from knee to ankle in the death struggles of his beautiful mare. “Trinor could have killed any of the rest of us with ease. Except perhaps for Tomb.”

  Of them all, the dwarf had suffered least: hung up there on his dented exoskeleton, he seemed to have taken strength from the slaughter; his energy axe flickered brightly, and his motor-assisted limbs moved as powerfully as ever. He chuckled morosely, gazing out across the valley.

  “I would have done for him, all right. But to what point? Look there, Grif: that is our future-”

  Out among the corpse heaps, black, huge figures moved on a strange mission, a mechanical ritual a thousand years old. The geteit chemosit had lost interest in the fight. Their triplex eyes glittering and shifting as if unanchored to their skulls, they stalked from corpse to corpse. They performed their curious surgery on the lifeless heads-and robbed each Viriconese, like the dead smuggler in the Metal-Salt Marsh, of his brain.

  “They will come for us after the Northmen have finished,” said Cromis. “What are they doing, Tomb?”

  “They are beginning the destruction of an empire,” answered the dwarf. “They will hack the brains out of the Stony City and eat them. They will take a power-knife and a spoon to Viriconium. Nothing will stop them.

  “Indeed, I wonder who are the actual masters of this battleground-it is often unwise to meddle with the artefacts of the Afternoon Cultures.”

  “tegeus-Cromis should go at once to the tower of Cellur,” said the metal bird, but no one listened to it.

  Theomeris Glyn, the old campaigner, sat some distance away from the rest of the Methven, hoping to reinvigorate his sword by stropping it on a dead man’s boot.

  “I think it is starting,” he called cheerfully. “They have licked their privates for the last time down there, and gathered up their courage.”

  With a wild yell, the Northerners threw themselves at the knoll, and it shook beneath the onslaught. A spearcast blackened the air, and when it had cleared, pikemen advanced unimpeded up the lower slopes, gutting the survivors and treading in their wounds.

  Behind the pikers came a never-ending wave of swordsmen, and axe-men, and berserk metal-prospectors from the northmost reaches of the waste, wielding queer weapons dug from pits in the ground. The shattered, pathetic remnant of Waterbeck’s expeditionary force fell back before them, and were overcome, and died. They hit the summit of the hill like some kind of earthquake, and they split the Methven, so that each one fought alone Tomb the Dwarf sniggered and swung his greedy axe. He towered above them, and they ran like rats around his silver-steel legs Birkin Grif cursed. His sword was shattered at the hilt, so he broke a Northman’s neck and stole another. He called to his smugglers, but all that brave and dirty crew were dead Old Glyn lunged. “You’ve never seen this one before,” he cackled, as he put his hidden knife in, “eh?” His opponent was astonished Cromis ducked and rolled like a fairground acrobat. The metal vulture was above him, the nameless sword was everywhere They came together, and made their stand.

  “Methven!” cried Cromis, and they answered him. “Methven!”

  Something in th
e grey air caught his eye, a movement beneath the cloud base. But a blade nicked his collarbone, and death demanded his attention. He gave it fully. When he next looked up, there were seven airboats in the sky where there had been four, and three of them bore the arms of Methvet Nian, Queen Jane of Viriconium. “Grif! Up there!”

  “If they are couriers,” said Grif, “they come a little late.”

  The crystal launches clashed with a sound like immense bells. As Cromis watched, the Northern squadron commander closed to ram: but the sky exploded suddenly around his ship, and burned, dripping cold fire; and, tail-first and crippled, it dropped out of the sky. Faint violet bolts chased it down.

  “There’s a cannon aboard one of those ships,” said Tomb the Dwarf wonderingly. “It is the Queen’s own flight.”

  Confused by this sudden renaissance in the air, the Northmen drew back from their prey and craned their necks. The dying airboat ploughed through them and blew up, scattering limbs and bits of armour. Howling with rage, they renewed their attack, and the Methven on the hill were hard put to it.

  Up above, one of the Viriconese boats left its sister ships to a holding action against the remaining three Northern craft, and began to cruise up and down the valley. But the Methven were unaware of this until its huge shadow passed over them, hesitated, and returned. Tomb crowed. He tore off Cromis’s tattered black cloak with a huge steel hand and waved it about above his head. The airboat descended, yawing.

  Ten feet above the top of the hill, it swung rapidly on its own axis, and fell like a stone. The energy cannon under its prow pulsed and spat. A hatch opened in its side. Its motors sang.

  It was a difficult retreat. The Northmen pressed in, determined to claim what was due to them. Tomb took a blow from a mace behind the knees of his exoskeleton: a servo failed, and he staggered drunkenly, flailing about him.

  Cromis found himself some yards away from the open hatch, the old campaigner at his side. They fought silently for a minute.

  Then Theomeris Glyn put his back squarely against a pile of corpses and showed the Northmen his teeth. “I don’t think I’ll come, Cromis,” he said. “You’ll need some cover.” He sniffed. “I don’t like flying machines anyway.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Cromis. He touched the old man’s arm, to show his gratitude. “We’ll make it.”

  But Glyn drew himself up. His age sloughed away from him. He had lost his helmet, and blood from a gash in his head had clotted in his beard; his padded doublet was in ruins, but the pride in his face shone out clear.

  “tegeus-Cromis,” he said, “you forget yourself. Age has its privileges, and one of them is to die. You will do me the honour of allowing me to do that in my own way. Get into the ship and I will cover your back. Go. Goodbye.”

  He met Cromis’s eyes.

  “I’ll gut a few of them, eh?” he said. “Just a few more. Take care.”

  And Theomeris Glyn, a lord of the Methven despite his years, turned to face his enemies. The last Cromis ever saw of him was a whirling rearguard of steel, a web such as he used to spin when the Old King ruled, and his blood was young.

  Trembling violently, blinded by the old man’s courage, Cromis stumbled through the hatch. The metal bird rocketed in after him. It was still screaming its useless message of warning: he suspected that its mechanisms had been damaged somehow during the fight. He slammed the hatch shut. Outside, the Northmen were beating their weapons on the hull, searching for another entrance, grunting like frustrated animals.

  The ship lurched, spun, hung five or ten feet off the ground. In the green, undersea gloaming of its command bridge, lights moved like dust motes in a ray of alien sun. Navigation instruments murmured and sang. “I’m having some trouble here,” said the pilot, conversationally. “Still, not to worry.” He was a rakish young man, his hair caught back with a pewter fillet in the fashion of the Courier Corps.

  Birkin Grif lay on the vibrating crystal deck, his face white and drained. Bent over his injured leg, a woman in a hooded purple cloak was attempting to staunch the bleeding. He was saying weakly, “My lady, you were a fool to come here-”

  She shook her head. Russet hair escaped her hood. Her cloak was fastened at the neck with a copper clasp formed to represent mating dragonflies. Looking at her, Cromis experienced a terrible premonition.

  Sprawled in a tangle of silver spars at the base of the navigation table, Tomb the Dwarf struggled with his harness. His ugly face was frantic. “Take her up! Take her up!” he shouted. “Help me out of this, someone-”

  “We can expect a bit of fuss when we get up there,” said the pilot. “Ah. Got her. Do hold tight-” He opened his throttles. The ship began to climb steeply.

  Cromis, stumbling toward the dwarf, was thrown to the deck. He dropped his sword. He hit his head on the fire control of the energy cannon. As he passed out, he recognised the woman in the purple cloak: it was Methvet Nian herself, the Young Queen.

  We are all insane, he thought. The Moidart has infected us all with her madness.

  7

  Shortly after Cromis came to his senses, the airboat was rammed.

  Clinging grimly to a stanchion as the daring young courier flung his ship about the dangerous sky, he felt as if he were sitting behind the eyes of a tumbler pigeon: earth and air blurred together in a whirling mandala of brown and grey, across which flickered the deadly silhouettes of the Northern airboats. He was aware that Tomb had finally escaped the embrace of his own armour, that Grif and the Young Queen had wedged themselves against the rear bulkhead of the command bridge.

  But his concern with events was abstract-since he could in no way influence the situation-and he had something else to occupy his mind: a speculation, a fear stimulated by the sudden appearance of Methvet Nian Abruptly, the portholes darkened. The ship gave a great shudder, and, with a sound like destroyed bells, its entire prow was torn off. Shards of crystal spat and whirred in the gloom. Five feet in front of the pilot, leaving his controls undamaged only by some freak of chance, an enormous hole opened in the hull: through it could be seen briefly the tumbling, receding wreck of the craft that had accomplished the ramming. An icy wind rushed in, howling.

  “Oh,” murmured the courier. A twelve-inch spike of crystal had split his skull. Three fingers could have been got in the wound with ease. He swayed. “We still have power-if anybody can fly this thing-” he said, puzzledly. “I am sorry, my lady-I don’t seem to be-” He fell out of his seat.

  Tomb the Dwarf scuttled on all fours across the listing deck to take his place. He fired off the energy cannon, but it tore itself away from the wreckage. “Benedict Paucemanly should see me now,” he said. He turned the ship in a wide loop, swung once over the battlefield. He flogged and cajoled it and nursed it over the waste, losing height. Beneath the cloud base, the sole uncrippled ship of the Queen’s flight fought a doomed action against the two remaining Northerners.

  “Look down there,” said Tomb, as they veered over the scene of Waterbeck’s rout. “What do you think of that?”

  The valley was a gaping wound filled with Northerners and dead men and thick white smoke which surged up from wrecked airboats, obscuring the dark figures of the geteit chemosit as they performed their acts of skull rape. The waste surrounding the battlefield was crawling with reptiles: hundreds of stiff, dust-coloured forms, converging slowly from south, east, and west, their motions stilted and strange.

  “Every lizard in the Great Brown Waste must be down there. What are they doing?”

  “They seem to be watching,” said Cromis. “Nothing else.” And, indeed, the ridges that flanked the valley were already lined with them, their stony heads unmoving as they gazed at the ruin, their limbs held rigid like those of spectators at some morbid religious observance.

  “We fascinate them,” said Birkin Grif bitterly. With the boat’s return to stability, he had regained his feet. His leg was still bleeding freely. “They are amazed by our propensity for self-destruction.” He laughed hollow
ly. “Tomb, how far can we get in this machine?”

  The ship drifted aimlessly, like a waterbird on a quiet current. The waste moved below, haunted by the gathering reptiles.

  “Duirinish,” said the dwarf. “Or Drunmore. We could not make Viriconium, even if Paucemanly had postponed his flight to the Moon, and sat here at the controls in my place.”

  Methvet Nian was kneeling over the dead courier, closing his eyes. Her hood was thrown back and her autumn-rowan hair cascaded about her face. Cromis turned from the strange sight of the monitor lizards, his earlier fears returning as he looked at her.

  “There is nothing for us in Duirinish,” he said, addressing himself only partly to Tomb. “Shortly, it will fall. And I fear that there is little point in our going to the Pastel City.” He shook his head. “I suspect you had a reason for coming here, Your Majesty?”

  Her violet eyes were wide, shocked. He had never seen anything so beautiful or so sad. He was overcome, and covered his emotion by pretending to hunt in the wreckage of the cabin for his sword.

  He came upon the limp carcass of Cellur’s metal vulture: like the young courier, it had been torn open by a shard of crystal; its eyes were lifeless, and pieces of tiny, precise machinery spilled out of its breast when he picked it up. He felt an absurd sympathy for it. He wondered if so perfect an imitation of organic life might feel a perfect imitation of pain. He smoothed the huge pinions of its wings.

  “Yes, Lord Cromis,” whispered the Young Queen. “This morning, the rebels rose again. Canna Moidart will find resistance only in Duirinish. Viriconium is in the hands of her supporters “My lords,” she appealed, “what will become of those people? They have embraced a viper-”

  And she wept openly.

  “They will be bitten,” said Birkin Grif. “They were not worthy of you, Queen Jane.”

  She wiped her eyes. The Rings of Neap glittered on her thin fingers. She drew herself up straight and gazed steadily at him.

  “You are too harsh, Birkin Grif. Perhaps the failure was not in them, but in their queen.”