Viriconium

by M. John Harrison

  The maze, he now understood, had lain in wait for him since his flight from the Bistro Californium, its centre coexistent with the hub of that affair. As he struggled down its cindery passageways he imagined himself stabbed again and again, a half-successful execution presided over by the mad laughter of the poet Ansel Verdigris. He lost his horse. Clutching the phantom wound in his side he groaned and drew his flawed steel knife (as if a gesture remembered from one maze might release him from the complexities of another). Despairing, he stumbled out into a circular space about thirty feet across, where he was relieved abruptly of the mosaic universe and saw normally again. This central stage or arena was raised a few inches above the level of the surrounding maze, and in the middle of it there waited an insect larger than a man -

  The violation, if there was one, was hieratic, notional. Fay Glass lay like a corpse. The creature crouched over her. It resembled no insect Hornwrack had ever seen but was rather a composite of all insects. From its segmented thorax, which was of a curious smoky yellow colour and as shiny as lacquered bamboo, sprang the veiny wings of the ichneumon fly, the wedge-shaped mask of the common wasp, the mysterious upcurved abdomen of the mantislike a symbol from a forbidden language. Its eyes were lit from within, or seemed to be. They were pale green, and streaked with orange. A mass of palps and maxillae hung beneath its head, clattering spasmodically. He thought of the wasteland grasshopper with its serrated legs and arid stridulations. He thought of flight through vast abandoned regions, and the world he knew fell away from him so suddenly that he was sick. When he could see again, the madwoman had come back to life.

  She made no attempt to get from beneath the insect, but, like something emerging painfully from a larval stage, groped and writhed about until she lay on her stomach, her neck twisted so that her white motionless face was turned to the assassin.

  “I,” she said, and retched dryly. She licked her lips. “We.”

  “I can’t help you,” said Hornwrack.

  The insect, he saw, was damaged. The raised and elongated prothorax from which issued its frail forelimbs was covered in cuts and gouges, some of them deep enough to reveal the whitish stored fat beneath. Crusted secretions rimmed its unearthly eyes. From time to time it scraped aimlessly in the ashes at its feet or beat wildly its filmy wings.

  “We see your world,” said the madwoman. “Killing is all dead world. World killed. We are all killed here.”

  Her voice was flat and mournful. It seemed to come from a huge distance away. In the pauses between the words Hornwrack himself became an insect. He flew through the great derelict spaces, shaken by compulsions he did not understand. Many others were there with him. A hunger drove them, presiding and unproductive. They fell into a choking air and were consumed.

  “We now press your heads. Our words are pressing your heads. Your world presses us. Oh. Gah.”

  The creature flailed its forelimbs against the ground until one of them fell off.

  “Gah,” said Fay Glass. “Help. Oh.”

  Hornwrack rushed forward and tried to haul her from under the clattering mandibles. She would not come. He felt the huge triangular mask dip toward him. He shouted and ran away again, slashing out blindly with his knife. Tomb the Dwarf came out of the maze and touched his elbow. They both ran forward and this time pulled her out. The dwarf lost his hat. “I. We. Oh,” whined Fay Glass, while the insect’s nervous system underwent some fresh deterioration, causing it to writhe, fan the air, and curl its abdomen repeatedly over its head. These spasms were replaced by a curious immobility, which in turn affected the madwoman. She lay on the floor like a pupating grub, the ends of her fingers bleeding where she had bitten them. The insect looked like a great enamelled brooch dug up from some depraved old city. Hornwrack and the dwarf watched it warily. It stared back, its eyes enigmatic, crusted. A faint smell of lemons hung about it, and behind that, rotting cabbage.

  “It sees us,” whispered Tomb. He licked his lips. “What did she say?” Then: “Can it see us?”

  Hornwrack was too out of breath to speak.

  The Reborn Men do not think as we do, but live-pursued by an incomprehensible past-among distempered waking dreams. Alstath Fulthor wandered into the centre of the maze from quite another entrance, his gait stilted. He stared at the insect in astonishment, flung a hand up in front of his face; a long groan came out of his mouth. He looked like some exotic mantis in his blood-red armour. Attracted perhaps by this, the insect turned with a clack clack of coxal joints to face him. (Hornwrack and the dwarf were now able to see the curious markings on its abdomen, the three black diagonal bars or fascia running across each wing.) He walked round it, groaning, his head working as if his neck contained bent clockwork. Plainly he thought he was in a dream of the Afternoon, for he murmured to himself of Arnac san Tehn and the “Yellow Gardens.” Now they faced one another again, and if Fulthor looked like an insect, then the thing before him with its hacked yellow prothorax resembled an armoured man. Fulthor glanced down at the energy blade spitting and fizzing in his hand. He hit the insect across the head with it, bursting an eye, cutting into the thorax, and shearing off one of its legs.

  It fell over on its side and dragged itself round in a circle, a high whining sound coming from its wings. Fay Glass darted about, shrieking. Fulthor hit it again; watched its redoubled frenzies with his head tilted intelligently on one side; then dropped his weapon, which immediately began fusing the ash around it into glass. “Oh, the great cups!” he cried. “The thousand flowers and roses! The thought with the force of a sensation!” He stared imploringly over at Hornwrack, then picked up his sword again and ran off into the maze, his eyes wide and his body leaning at an incredible angle to the vertical.

  The mutilated insect had fetched up against one of the cindery walls and was trying to climb it. Ash showered down. Fay Glass wept, “Wait, we are killed here. Vienna, Blackpool, Venice, drown in their own tears. Press our world. Oh. Oh.” Above her head there materialised suddenly the ghost of Benedict Paucemanly, flabby face full of fear. It grimaced apologetically- “Fenlen! Fenlen!”-and was carried away on some psychic current, waving its arms. Dark clouds had blown up from the west, and now a scatter of hard snow filled the grey air, pattering off the carapace of the insect, which lay motionless in a corner, a flicker of orange animating its remaining eye. The ground was ploughed up all around it. Fay Glass, exhausted, was walking round and round the central area with her hands over her face, moaning.

  Hornwrack stared at the churned earth, the wreckage of the insect. He shuddered.

  “Look after her,” he told Tomb the Dwarf. “Try and find Cellur. Tell him about this. He may understand what is happening here.” And with that he set off into the maze in search of the Reborn Man.

  8

  GALEN HORNWRACK AND THE NEW INVASION

  Down ran Alstath Fulthor, last representative of his House, a scarlet figure with a stride like an ostrich’s; and down ran Hornwrack the assassin after him, the breath rattling in his lungs. The maze was behind them, the village before. In the maze, fearing the hidden junction, the sudden mad leap and mantid clutch, the bared teeth of an ambush, Hornwrack had drawn the old sword; out there on the plain it dragged down his arm. Westward the land was all as dark as the sky, long black salients reaching back beneath the cold clouds, their flanks scored by steep-sided valleys and dotted with piles of haunted stones. In the east a little of the early brightness remained to pick out the shattered towers of the Agdon Roches, to touch the escarpment and its oakwoods with a lichenous grey. Mist still choked the village beneath, thick and slow, but a new wind had stirred out in the waste and was beginning to tease its edges out in streamers, like sheep’s wool caught on a fence. The light infused these strands with a delicate yellow, and they smelt strongly of lemons.

  Alstath Fulthor flung up his arms and was engulfed. Hornwrack followed, with a desperate cry.

  The mist enwrapped them; it stuffed their lungs with cotton wool. They passed like two cough
ing ghosts along the silent village street. The cottages that loomed on either side were tenantless, dusty, and cold, their front doors lodged open and creaking in the small winds which seemed to inhabit the inside of the mist. From the empty rooms behind issued dry smells. Birdlime was spattered beneath the eaves, and the gutters were choked with old nests. Sacking lifted in the wind; lifted, dropped, and lifted again.

  Alstath Fulthor drew ahead. He became a shadow, and then only a thud of footfalls. Hornwrack ran on, isolated and a little afraid. Death, he saw, had been there before them; perhaps a month, perhaps two months before. A dead man hung half in and half out of a broken window beneath the spattered eaves. Another sat like a bundle of sticks propped up in the angle of a stone wall. They observed one another dryly, as if some old joke had recently passed between them. Their weapons were orange with rust but their bodies, instead of decomposing, seemed to have shrunk, and were as intact as tight old sheaves of straw tied up in ancient sacking; as though the mist in advancing one process of decay had retarded the other. The village was full of corpses, staring out of doorways, caught in contorted attitudes on the grass round the horse trough-looking surprised or complacent or out of breath. Others had drawn their knives and had been about to throw themselves on some enemy. A few children had fallen down during a game in which they followed one another stealthily among the houses, hands held hooked above their heads.

  “They sail inland all night,” thought Hornwrack, and for a moment the face of St. Elmo Buffin came into his mind, decent, puzzled, wistful. “ Where they are going we do not know- ”

  They had been coming here. Wherever they had come from they had ended up here, standing at salient junctions like abandoned machines, their broken antennae and cracked wings dangling in the wind, their compound eyes as dull as stones. Patches of corruption darkened the ground beneath them like tarry shadows, as if vital fluids had bled slowly from abdomen and thorax to fertilize a crop of bluish mushrooms and unearthly moulds before drying up altogether. With this desiccation had come the slow retreat of the intelligence into the husk, the drying up of the violent insectile telepathies received by Hornwrack and the others in the maze, those incidental broadcasts from the mosaic universe which had driven Buffin’s sailors to burn their own ships or drown themselves in the fog-bound sea.

  At night, its mad energy not quite spent, a disembodied head bounced down the gutters of Hornwrack’s Low City dreams, accompanied by the laughter of the crackpot poet: plainly it had originated here among these dilapidated hulks, one out of three of which had fallen under the energy blades of the Reborn villagers and, curious viscera exposed in section, now lay surrounded by a litter of amputated limbs. Someone had cut it off and sent it south as a call for help. The rest of them, though they showed a few shallow cuts and scrapes made by less-exotic weapons-like violent scribbles on a lacquered screen-had evidently succumbed to the same disease as the lone survivor in the maze. Crusted discharges had swollen their joints. Strings of hardened mucus hung from the curious appendages attached by leather straps to their facial parts. They faced one another in the mechanistic postures of their death, and a faint whisper of telepathy was draped about them like a cobweb. It touched the inside of his skull as he ran dreaming between them, afraid they would come back to life if he lingered.

  He ducked beneath a complicated snout. He pushed aside a canted crackling wing. He waved the old sword about until his arm ached. Later he might recall this: now he knew nothing. The wings of the wasteland locust rustled uneasily in his head, gathering for some vast migration. He no longer cared about Alstath Fulthor, running ahead in the mist. He leapt and sang like a grasshopper, and his progress had become a flight.

  Alive or dead, he managed to think, they have altered the earth; they have changed it manifestly. Something has come into it…

  … And thinking this, emerged from the village. It was like a door opening and closing. When he looked back the mist was streaming away along the foot of the escarpment in the new wind, and the three small figures of Cellur, Tomb, and Fay Glass, issuing uncertainly from the maze, had begun to cross the plain.

  Hornwrack and Fulthor confronted in a stony cleft among dwarf birch and oak. A chalky light, slanting down between the brittle boughs onto banks of heather and bilberry, revealed the Reborn Man sitting quietly on an unfinished millstone, his features as white and careworn as those of a praying king. A pied bird absorbed his attention: it hopped from stone to stone, tilting its small bright eye to watch him. Chill airs rattled the twigs above his head, stirred his yellow hair. The baan in his hand flickered like a firework in the hand of a child; he had forgotten it. Votive and calm in his scarlet armour, he looked like the invalid knight in the old painting; and the overhanging towers of the Agdon Roches, with their silent gullies and damp sandy courses, rose up behind him through a screen of black branches like the buttresses of an ancient chapel.

  When Hornwrack pushed his way through the oaks, old leaves and lichenous dust showered down, and the little bird flew away.

  “Fulthor?”

  The wounded king wakes and stares about him with a new fear. He has risen from the devotions of one nightmare into the ruins of another. “Where is this place?” he’ll whisper. None will speak. “Back, then!” he’ll cry, sweeping the great baan round his head in an arc which makes the sound of panicked wings. Shadows fly like wounded doves from horizon to horizon. Precarious flowers bloom in his secret heart…

  “Hornwrack! Am I mad?” A bitter laugh. “Another dream. More days lost in the absolute abyss of Time. Oh, the fiery woman, with her expressionless eyes! How long have I been away?”

  And he advanced dreamily on Hornwrack, still swinging the energy blade.

  “Fulthor!” screamed Hornwrack, who saw no magical king (who could blame him? He had been born three millennia too late) and who failed to hear the hum of that long-declining dream: “It’s me!” He ducked the lethal stroke, offered the old steel sword (its tip was lopped off instantly), stepped in desperately close, and hammered Fulthor’s wrist with the pommel of his trusty knife. Nerveless, the white hand opened. The baan fell. Fulthor gave a howl of despair and sat down suddenly. “Must I always choose between there and here?” He regarded Hornwrack from between his hands. “Kill me then.” He looked round. “Where are we?”

  Hornwrack, however, was no longer interested.

  The ghost of Benedict Paucemanly had reappeared, to float over the oakwood mouthing like a drowned sailor; and through its unsteady, half-transparent shape he had caught a sudden glimpse of the horizon. There, insectile silhouettes processed slowly against a greenish sky, full of bitter snow. They seemed to carry with them an unquiet cobalt halo; along their sides flared sphenograms of an acid green; they held their forelegs delicately raised. Over the summits of the Agdon Roches they went, southwards, with an exquisite mechanical concentration, looking neither left nor right.

  The world started to melt like candle wax.

  Hornwrack got Fulthor somehow to his feet. Unspeaking, they descended the hill.

  Snow whirled round them. Roots caught at their feet. Paucemanly encouraged them with whistles and farts.

  “I really mean it, you blokes-ten thousand nights were put in one! There I lay, listening to the winds gathering in the dry places, the abandoned places. We’re all in it now, us and them, raw-blind on the water stair at Shadwell Pier like burnt rats! Phew! The white moon makes thus ‘the stair of our descent’…” There was more of this. “Ooh, what you must think of me I don’t know,” he would exclaim fishily, and then, screwing up his eyes behind the faceplate of his abominable mask, bawl “Felneck! Fandle! FENLEN!”

  – his queer epicene voice hooting across the hillside like a signal while, above, the insectile procession moved on imperturbably: south, south, south…

  The new wind, rushing blindly out of the east under a cavernous overcast, had brought black obscurity to the village, whose streets were now full of flying chemical ice blown in from the Deep Wast
e. The dead insects at each corner creaked and shifted in the gale. Their eyes were pitted and stony. Above them splinters of chitin, sections of antennae and shattered veiny wing floated and spun in the rooftop eddies like the rubbish of the Low City rattling round the chimneys below Alves on a blustery night. Hornwrack leaned on Alstath Fulthor, his eyes rimed with urgent ice, the words blown out of his mouth and every thought out of his skull. They came down the main street like drunks in the weak glow of Fulthor’s armour. All else was shadowy, hard to interpret. Dead men leaned conversationally forward as they passed, then toppled onto empty faces, limbs breaking away like the rotten limbs of scarecrows to go bounding off down the road and lodge in a fence.

  Cellur the Birdmaker awaited them at the centre of the village, where the wind was whipping spray off the horse trough and the front doors were banging on rooms inhabited only by mice and suffocated children. He had with him Tomb the Dwarf. From the debacle in the maze they had retrieved three horses and the pony, which now stood in the street shifting bad-temperedly with each fresh gust of wind: Tomb was redistributing the surviving baggage between them as if in preparation for a further journey into the deep madness of the world. This activity made an island of humanity in the rushing gloom, at the approaches of which hovered the madwoman, wrapped from head to foot in a thick whitish garment and turning aimlessly this way and that like something hanging from a privet branch.

  Alstath Fulthor looked emptily at this scene as if he recognized no one in it, then sat down in the road. Hornwrack, tugging at his arm, heard the birdmaker shout, “Ride! West, for your life!” He shook his head. “Wait!” He wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. The old man had got up on his horse now and was watching them impatiently, his embroidered cloak streaming in the wind. The dwarf ran round checking saddlebags, tightening girths, and urging the inert Fay Glass into her saddle by means of pantomimic threats. The wind rose and fell cynically, tugging at the dry husks of the insects. The horses milled about, sensing an imminent departure. Hornwrack let go of Fulthor’s wrist (“Black piss! Stay there, then, if you must!”) and caught at the birdmaker’s stirrup instead. The horse dragged him off his feet, the old man’s yellow face swam above him, alive with what he took to be fear. They were in an eddy or pocket in the gale.