Viriconium

by M. John Harrison

  For the first time, he sensed, her courage had faltered, and she was sustained in her determination to remain in the Low City only by her ready self-contempt, her appalling strength of will. This disappointed him obscurely where, before the kidnap attempt, it would have given him heart.

  Outside the studio the Low City deteriorated daily, its meaningless commerce and periods of stunned lethargy mimicking the dull decline of Audsley King’s spirit. Shredded political posters flapped from the iron railings. Rain blew across the muddy grass. The horse chestnut flowers guttered like grey wax candles. The plague cut off first Moon Street, then Uranium Square, making peninsulas then archipelagos out of them-finally it engulfed each little island while its unsuspecting inhabitants were asleep. In the sodden churchyards and empty squares the police of the Barley brothers stood about in small groups, jeering at the police of the Grand Cairo. Poets droned from the abandoned estaminets.

  Audsley King seems to observe all this from a dream, Ashlyme wrote, beginning a new page in his journal. Her expression is terrible: hungry, despairing, hopeful, all at once.

  He could not release himself from a sense of guilt. A self-portrait painted at about this time, “Kneeling with raised arms,” shows him, his eyes squeezed closed, apparently crawling and groping his way about his own studio, a whitish empty space. He seems to have come up against some sort of invisible barrier, against which he is pressing one side of his face so that it is distorted and whitened into a mask of frustration and despair. (This obstacle was probably the full-length mirror he had brought with him to the city some years before, as a student. In spite of its size and weight he always took it with him when he moved from studio to studio.) The original oil of the painting has been lost, but a watercolour study shows it to have been one of his most powerful pieces. He disliked it markedly, and wrote, I have drawn a rather unpleasant thing today after seeing the Grand Cairo. It is because of the outrage he has done my freedom.

  The dwarf’s relations with the Barley brothers now underwent a further deterioration. It was not made clear what plots and counterplots were involved. But Ashlyme noted: He has let himself go. His boots are dirty and he reeks of hair oil. I return home late at night to find him waiting for me. If the Barley brothers are mentioned he flies into a rage, denouncing them for their latest betrayal and shouting, “They were down in the gutters until I dragged them out!” and “What thanks have I ever got for that?” Raving like this seems to tire him out, and then he spends most of his time slumped in a chair rememberingthe good times he has had in some brothel or other on the Rue des Horlogers.

  Beneath his obliquity and his vile temper he is a child. Though they have done him no harm as far as I can see, he goes in such hatred of his masters that he has even made up a sort of embroidered mythological slander to account for them. The details of the myth vary from day to day, but its basis is always much the same.

  The Barley brothers, he claims, are all that remain of a race of magicians or demiurges driven out of Viriconium hundreds or thousands of years ago in a war with “giant beetles.” Finding themselves exiled in the inhospitable sumps and deserts to the north, these creatures first built cities of stone cubes “with gaps between them through which the wind rumbles,” then set about projecting themselves backwards in time to a remoter, happier period of the world. By now most of them have achieved this aim, and their cities are derelict, inhabited only by mirages, simulacra, or ordinary human beings trying to mimic their culture. The Barley brothers were left behind as a punishment for some moral flaw in their natures, and in their attempts to follow where they are not wanted they have somehow become stuck in our city.

  This story shows the complexity and force of the dwarf’s feelings. All he has he owes to the Barleys, though he wishes he did not. When he tells it his eyes are glazed and inturned, as if the events were still there in front of him but can only be discerned by a great effort. He makes broad yet hesitant gestures. He is very clever at details, especially architectural ones, and he dwells with considerableingenuity on the sin of the Barley brothers which has kept them from following their peers into the past. If he did not fully believe his own tale to beginwith, he has now left himself no choice.

  One night the dwarf spoke of a city built by this race in the North (or perhaps in the sky, although he did not explain how this was possible):

  “The people in their black overcoats seemed to drift along a few inches above the pavements. Now and then the wind pulled shadows over them so that the scene trembled like water. Their faces were white with conspiracy. Their eyes were wide open, passive; they had abandoned themselves to the wind between the blocks which pushed them gently along. Now and then there was a laugh, quickly stifled. We had them weighed up. Each one would do anything for you if he believed he had been let into some secret unknown to the rest. In the evenings a new wind howled and screamed in off the waste, bringing with it enormous lizards and insects. Handfuls of ash and ice were thrown down the streets like glass marbles. On Sundays the wet streets were carpeted with dead locusts. The Barley brothers have invented many towns, but this was the worst. I found them in the gutters there, and they soon dragged me down with them!”

  He was silent for five minutes. Then he asked to see the knife he had given Ashlyme before the kidnap attempt. He always asked to see it: perhaps it was in his eyes the reaffirmation of a bond.

  “I got that knife up there in the North,” he said, “and I had to do some quick work to keep it. Quick work! Do you know what we mean when we say that? Quick work is when you have to move your feet or go to the wall!” And he danced round the studio, showing his stained teeth and making clumsy passes with the knife until he was out of breath. “Oh, yes, there was blood on this knife from the moment I had it. I’ve lived in some queer spots, I can tell you. That knife and I have been in some queer spots!” His eyes took on a distant, romantic look, and he rubbed his thumb up and down the curiously flawed blade before handing it back.

  “That knife will serve you well one day,” he said portentously. “I can tell you that.”

  Ashlyme was impressed by his powers of invention. In the end, though, he recorded, I listen without believing. He tires, mumbles, allows his head to fall on his chest, snores. Suddenly he wakes up with a start and goes home biting his nails, afraid that he has contracted a syphilis in the Rue des Horlogers, and forgets everything he has said. By tomorrow he will have invented somethingelse to place the Barleys in a bad light.

  Each night before leaving he gave Ashlyme some new gift for the fortune-teller. He would not hear of abandoning his suit. The longer she resisted him, the more inappropriate his presents became: a hank of hair, signet rings with obscene designs, a rusty flint picked up in some desert long ago. She accepted them expressionlessly, repeating, “What your friend suggests is not yet possible. My responsibilities are here.” He lost his temper with Ashlyme. He had reason to believe, he said, that his expensive flowers had been given to Audsley King instead of Fat Mam Etteilla; some of his gifts had been found in a dustbin; his letters were not being delivered. He brushed aside all Ashlyme’s explanations. “Bring her to me or it’ll be the worse for you,” he said.

  Unnerved, Ashlyme put this to the Fat Mam the next time he was in the Rue Serpolet. She looked at him sharply, then said,

  “Very well.”

  That morning, Audsley King had suffered a small haemorrhage and was resting with open mouth and bluish lips on the studio fauteuil, turning over restively now and again to murmur in some language Ashlyme didn’t know. So as not to wake her, they were standing in the passage just the other side of the curtain, talking in low voices.

  Ashlyme was surprised. “Do you mean to go and see him in his own house?”

  “Yes,” said the fortune-teller. “Why not?” Suddenly she blushed, and smoothed her hair with one big, chapped hand. “A strong man will always have his own way in the end,” she said complacently.

  Ashlyme stared at her.

  The meet
ing took place one evening a week later, in the dwarf’s salle.

  He had worked feverishly to prepare it for the occasion. All week, the teams of carpenters and interior decorators had gone to and fro, working to his precise instructions.

  The floor had been stained black and polished. His collection of paintings had been taken down carefully and stored. The walls were covered with white linen dustcloth up to a height of about twenty feet. This had been stretched tight and pinned to make a background for a profusion of objects made from straw, hair, and metal, and also many tools such as pliers, hammers, pincers, and chisels, which hung from coppered nails or braided silk cords or specially made brackets of the dwarf’s own devising. There were old sheaves of corn, full of dust and shrivelled mice; samplers woven out of the hair of girls; two or three mantraps black with rust; and a monkey made of twisted jute fibres on a soft wire armature. All these things had been decked with loose spirals of yellow and green ribbon. A greyish light fell on them. Above them lurked the smoky umber void of the original room, a space the colour of time and decay.

  The furniture had been dressed similarly. Draped with white cloth, wound about with coloured ribbon, the armchairs, armoires, and cupboards took on the air of huge, vaguely threatening parcels.

  It wasn’t clear how many people the dwarf was expecting. A long trestle table in the centre of the room was loaded with food, mostly game birds still in their feathers, glazed pies, custards, and large joints of meat decorated with paper frills. Crudely plaited “corn dollies,” such as a child may make from raffia or straw on a wet afternoon in the midland levels, had been placed among the baskets of fruit, the bottles of genever, and the thick white plates. In the middle of the table was a full-sized sheep’s head, stripped and varnished, with oranges for eyes. On each side of this stood a vase of late hawthorn blossom, filling the room with the thick, soporific scent of the may.

  Fat Mam Etteilla eyed these preparations nervously. She had given nothing away as she swept through the Haadenbosk, looking neither right nor left. But the queer environs of Montrouge had puzzled her, and the attentions of the dwarf’s police, though friendly, had weakened her resolve. She stared up into the vault of the old room and toyed with the floral trimmings of her hat. She is already wishing she hadn’t come, thought Ashlyme, and in an effort to make her feel more at home he said cheerfully,

  “Well, he’s put on quite a show for you. Look at all this food! Do you think anyone would mind if I had one of these plums?”

  When the dwarf arrived he took Ashlyme aside and said in a low voice, “I’ve dreamed the name of a street two nights in succession, Ashlyme. A street in the North.” He slopped some genever into a glass and drank it off. “What do you think of that? It’s made me damnably nervous, I don’t mind telling you.”

  He noticed the fortune-teller. Immediately he was all charm. “My dear woman!” he cried, smiling up at her with all his blackened teeth. “Are you well? Are you fully recovered from those appalling events in the Rue Serpolet?” He looked slyly over his shoulder at Ashlyme, who turned away and pretended to be interested in something else. “You must tell us as soon as you feel in the slightest bit tired!” The fat woman, holding her hat with both hands in front of her, blushed modestly at the shiny floor and allowed herself to be ushered past the curious collection on the walls.

  The Grand Cairo lost no chance to impress her. He turned this way and that to display his best profile. He stood with his spine arched and his chest thrust out and his hands tucked into the small of his back, looking up at her sideways to judge the effect he was having. He had dressed for the occasion in green velvet trousers tied up below the knee with red string, boots whose polished steel toecaps gave back a curved, bemusing reflection of the room at large, and a collarless shirt over which he wore unfastened a shiny black waistcoat. Round his neck he had a bit of green rag; and his hair had been slicked down with repeated applications of Altaean Balm, the powerful smell of which filled the room and mingled oddly with the scent of the may.

  They made a strange pair, shuffling from exhibit to exhibit in the grey light. When he had shown her all his pieces of bone, his hair dolls, and blunt iron sickles twined with ribbon like convolvulus, he explained the meaning of each object and also where he had got it. This he had won at cards; that he had dug up in a desert; no value could be put on that one. He spoke coaxingly. “You can have any of these things. They are all very lucky.” But she was nervous and looked away. The Grand Cairo would not be downcast. He winked at Ashlyme with the vulgar gallantry of the secret policeman, as if to say, “I’m not finished by a long way yet!”

  On a table he had a machine in a box. When he did something to it with his hands it produced a thin complaining music like the sound of a clarinet in the distance on a windy night, to which he tapped his feet and nodded his big head energetically, while he grinned round the room. But this only further confused the fortune-teller, and as soon as he saw that she would not dance, he shrugged and made haste to silence it. “We had a lot of those in the North,” he said.

  “Look at this,” he invited her. “You can have this.” He stuck out his hand and made her look at the ring he had on it. “Inside here,” he boasted, “I carry the most deadly poison there is, made from the excrement of cats. I always wear this ring, even while I am asleep. And if it ever happened that I found myself in a position intolerable to my pride…”

  He unscrewed the bezel of the ring. The fortune-teller stared expressionlessly down at the dull powder it contained.

  “You can have that,” he said, snapping it shut.

  She shook her head slowly in her bovine way. He smiled and looked directly into her eyes.

  “Tell me my future, then,” he ordered.

  The night was coming on. Fat Mam Etteilla sat resting her bosoms comfortably on the edge of the little green baize table, two dark patches of sweat spreading slowly under the arms of her dress. She shuffled the cards, spread them, and stared at them in surprise. The dwarf, looking over her shoulder, laughed loudly. He lit a lamp and sat down opposite her. “That’s something, eh?” he said. “What do you think of that?” Dull gold light flared off the grubby, colourful slips of pasteboard. He tilted his head to one side and considered them intently.

  “Again!” he ordered. The fat woman went on staring at him. “Again!”

  Ashlyme sat forgotten in a corner of the room. He had asked if he might go home, but the dwarf would not let him. “I might want you to take a message for me,” he said carelessly. The hot food cooled; the sheep’s head gazed into the gathering gloom with its bulging eyes; downstairs the dwarf’s police came and went, came and went, with their urgent reports from the Artists’ Quarter, their rumours from Cheminor, and their suspects from the Pont de Nile. None of this was interesting to the fortune-teller and her client. Only their two heads were visible, leaning avidly over the cards in the gold wash of light. Sometimes they set up a dull murmur: “Two rivers-a message!” “Avoid a meeting!” The room grew chilly. Ashlyme wrapped himself in his cloak and slept uncomfortably.

  Later there was a quarrel; or perhaps he dreamed it. Someone knocked the table over in the dark. A stool scraped on the floor. A bottle fell and broke. Ashlyme heard the Fat Mam breathing heavily through her mouth, then the words,

  “I am committed in the Rue Serpolet! What you ask is not yet possible!”

  He had a confused impression of the cards spilling through the cold air the way a conjuror spills them from hand to hand, each small crude picture bright and cruel and alive and very far away.

  When he next woke it was early dawn. If the table had been knocked over, they had righted it again and now sat with their elbows on it, looking first at the cards and then into one another’s eyes. The dwarf had disarranged his hair; it stood up in spikes, and beneath it his face was eroded and unhealthy. A half-eaten meal and a jug of “housemaid’s coffee” stood at the Fat Mam’s elbow, and there was dried milk in the hairs on her upper lip.

 
They seemed to be talking a language Ashlyme didn’t understand. He shook his head, cleared his throat, hoping they would notice him and become less remote. Fat Mam Etteilla gazed at him blankly for a second, an expression of greed fading from her features. The Grand Cairo got up and stretched. He walked over and pulled one of the oranges out of the sheep’s head, then went into the other room, peeling it. Ashlyme heard a muffled oulouloulou through the wall. A moment later the cats began to come in from Montrouge. They surrounded the card table, rubbing their heads against the fortune-teller’s ankles, more and more of them until the room was full of their drugged purr.

  “None of these cats is mine,” the dwarf told her proudly, finishing his orange. “They come to me from all over the city because I speak their language. What do you think of that?”

  She smoothed her hair complacently.

  “Very nice,” she said.

  Ashlyme left them and walked stiffly out into the city, where the thin milky light of dawn was falling across the earthworks and onto the faces of the dwarf’s raw new buildings. When he looked back the tower was dark but for a single yellow window, against which he could make out two silhouetted figures. He rubbed his eyes.

  THE FOURTH CARD

  THE LORD OF THE FIRST OPERATION

  Chaos and uncertainty follow this card. A journey or undertaking of which the outcome cannot be guessed. According to another reading, vacillation.

  “I have heard the cafe philosophers say, ‘The world is so old that the substance of reality no longer knows what it ought to be.’ ”

  ANSEL VERDIGRIS, Some Remarks to my Dog

  If you stood at the window in the studio at Mynned and looked out towards the Low City, you felt that Time was dammed up and spreading out quietly all around you like a stagnant pond. The sky was the colour of zinc.