Viriconium

by M. John Harrison

  “Poor Prinsep!” said my mother, hugging us all on the way home. “He deserves your prayers.” But it wasn’t until much later that I learned the sad facts of his death or the sadder ones of his life.

  By then I could be found in the pavement cafes of Sour Bridge, with a set of my own. We favoured the Red Hart Estaminet, not just for its cheap suppers and boldly coloured art posters but because it was the haunt of visiting painters, writers, and music-hall artistes who had come from Viriconium to take the Wasserkur in sheds outside the town. When they weren’t being hosed down with ice-cold water for their bowel disorders and gonorrhoeas, I suppose, it amused them to make fun of our scrubbed young faces, provincial romances, and ill-fitting suits.

  It was at the Red Hart that I first met Madame de Maupassant, the famous contralto, by then a creature bent and diminished by some disease of the throat, with a voice so ravaged it was painful and frightening at the same moment to hear her speak. I could not imagine her on the stage-I didn’t know then that to maintain her popularity in the city she still sang with deadly effort every night at the Prospekt Theatre. I thought of her as a menacing but rather vapid old woman obsessed with certain colours, who would lean over the table and say confidentially, “When I was in church as a girl I observed that flies would not pass through the lilac rays from a stained-glass window. Again, it would appear that all internal parasites die if exposed to the various shades of lavender; the doctor is disposed to try a similar remedy in my case.” Or: “An honest man will admit that his most thrilling dreams are accompanied by a violet haze… Do you know the dreams I mean?”

  I did.

  One day she said, to my surprise, “So you’re Baladine Prinsep’s nephew. I knew him quite well, but he never spoke of a family. Don’t you follow in his footsteps: all those years at a woman’s feet, and never more than a smile! There’s a patient man for you.”

  And she gave her characteristic croak of a laugh.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What woman?”

  Which made Madame de Maupassant laugh all the more. Eventually, I suppose, I persuaded her to tell me what my mother had kept from us, what Viriconium had always known.

  “When your uncle came to the city,” she said, “twenty years ago, he found the dancer Vera Ghillera at the height of her success, appearing twice nightly at the Prospekt in a ballet called The Little Humpbacked Horse choreographed for her by Chevigne.

  “After every performance she held court in a dressing room done out with reds and golds like a stick of sealing wax. There was a tiger-skin rug on the floor. You never saw such dim yellow lamps, brass trays, and three-legged tables decorated with every vulgar little onyx box you could mention! Here they all came to invite her to supper, and she made them sit on the tiger skin and talk about art or politics instead: Paulinus Rack the impresario, ailing and thin now, like a white ghost; Caranthides, whose poems had been printed that year for the first time in a volume called Yellow Clouds and whose success was hardly less spectacular than her own; even Ashlyme the portrait painter came, stared at her face with a kind of irritable wonder, and went away again-his marriage to Audsley King put an end to anything like that before it could begin.

  “Your uncle knew nothing about the ballet then. He saw the ballerina by chance one day, as he was looking out of his window into the street.

  “He was young and lonely. He had taken rooms near the asylum at Wegs, where she went in secret once a month, wrapped in a dove-grey cloak. He soon became her most ardent admirer, waiting on the stairs outside the dressing-room door, fourteen white lilies under his arm in green tissue paper. Eventually she let him in and he had a favoured seat on one of the gilt paws of the tiger. He could be seen any night after that (though what he did in the day remained a mystery), staring up at her with a melancholy expression, taking no part in the conversation of the great men around him. She never gave him any further encouragement; she had her own affairs. In the end he died there, as uselessly as he had lived-much older then of course.”

  I was profoundly shocked by this, and stung, though I tried not to show it. “Perhaps the arrangement suited him,” I said bravely, trying to invest the word arrangement with a significance it plainly did not have; and when the famous contralto had received this with the blank stare it deserved: “Anyway, he wrote a book about the city, The Constant Imago. He gave me a copy of it.” I raised my voice and looked round at my friends. “It is my opinion that he was a great artist, genuinely in love with art.”

  Madame de Maupassant shrugged.

  “I know nothing about books,” she said with a sigh. “But it was your uncle’s idea of conversation to sidle into a room along the wall like a servant, and when recognised say in a querulous voice, like this, ‘I have never found it necessary to have such a high opinion of God…’ Then he would regard his audience with that watery, fish-like stare he had, having struck them dumb with incomprehension. He was the most futile man I ever knew.”

  I never saw her again. She soon grew tired of her cure and went back to Viriconium, but I couldn’t forget this final judgement of my uncle. If I thought of him at all after that it was with a kind of puzzled sympathy-I saw him walking at night with his head bowed, along the rainy streets near the asylum, two or three sentences of his book his only company, with the shouts of the lunatics coming to his ears like the cries of distant exotic animals; or looking dully out of his window into the orange glare of the lamps, hoping that the ballerina would pass-although he knew it was the wrong time of the month. I remembered the provincial waistcoat he had given me; somehow that completed my disappointment. Then another winter closed the pavement cafes in Sour Bridge and I forgot the author of The Constant Imago until the death of my mother some years later.

  My mother loved cut flowers, especially those she had grown herself, and often kept them long after they were withered and brown because, she said, they had given her so much pleasure. When I think of her now she is always in a room full of flowers, watering them from a blue and white jug. All through her last illness she fought the nurse over a vase of great white marguerite daisies. The nurse said she would rather be dismissed than allow them to remain by the bed at night; it was unhealthy. My mother promptly dismissed her. When I went into the long, quiet room one afternoon to remonstrate with her over this, I found her prepared.

  “We must get rid of that woman,” she said darkly. “She’s trying to poison me!” And then, coolly anticipating the nurse’s own arguments: “You know I can’t get my breath without a few flowers near me.”

  She knew she was wrong. She stared with a kind of musing delight at the daisies, and at me. Then she sighed suddenly.

  “Your uncle Prinsep was a silly, weak man.” She clutched my arm. “Promise me you’ll have your own home, and not live like that on the verge of someone else’s life.”

  I promised.

  “It was his mother’s fault,” she went on in a more practical voice. “She was a woman of personality. And then, you see, they lived in that huge house at the back of nowhere. She attacked the servants physically if they didn’t bow to her; she had her porridge fetched every morning from another village, because there it was made more nearly to her taste. This behaviour made her sons leave her one by one. Prinsep was the youngest, and the last to go-he was painstaking in his efforts to placate her, but in the end even he found it easier not to remain.”

  She sighed again.

  “I always had a horror that I would do the same to my own children.”

  Before I went to take her apologies to the nurse, she said, “You had better have this. It is the key to your uncle Prinsep’s rooms. You are old enough to live in Viriconium now; and if you must, you must.” She held my wrist and put the key in the palm of my hand, a little brass thing, not very shiny. “One day when you were young,” she said, “the wind broke the stems of the hollyhocks. They lay across the wall with all their beautiful flowers intact. While they could be of use like that the insects still flew in and
out of them busily: I thought it a shame.”

  She hung on all that summer in the cool room, making our lives painful but unable to relax and let us go. During that time I often looked at the key she had given me. But I didn’t use it until she died in the autumn: I was sure she wouldn’t have wanted to know that I had gone to the city and turned it in its lock.

  It turned easily enough after so many years, and I stood there confused for a moment on the threshold of Uncle Prinsep’s life and my own, not daring to go in. I had lost my way by the Aqualate Pond with its curious echoes and fogs; like most people who come there I had not until then realised the extent of Viriconium, or its emptiness. But the rooms, when at last I went into them, were ordinary enough-bare grey boards with feathers of dust, a few books on the shelves, a few pictures on the whitewashed walls. In the little kitchen there was a cupboard, with some things for making tea. I was tired. There was another room, but I left it unopened and dropped my belongings on the iron bed, my boxes and cases wet with salt from passage of the Yser.

  Underneath the bed with the pot for nightsoil I found two or three copies of The Constant Imago.

  I was in Viriconium once. I was a much younger woman then. What a place that is for lovers! The Locust Winter carpets its streets with broken insects; at the corners they sweep them into strange-smelling drifts which glow for the space of a morning like heaps of gold before they fade away…

  After I have looked in the other room, I thought, and found somewhere to put my things, I will go to sleep, and perhaps wake up happier in the morning. After all, I am here now. So I put the book aside and turned the key again in the lock.

  When he first fell in love with Vera Ghillera, my uncle had had the walls of this room painted a dull, heavy sealing-wax red; at the window there were thick velvet curtains of the same colour, pulled shut. Pictures of the ballerina were everywhere-on the walls, the tables, the mantelpiece- posing in costumes she had worn for La Chatte, The Fire Last Wednesday at Lowth, and The Little Humpbacked Horse -painted with her little chin on her hand, looking over a railing at the sea, smiling mysteriously from under a hat. The woman herself, or her effigy made in a kind of yellow wax, lay on a catafalque in the centre of the room, her strange, compact dancer’s body naked, the legs parted in sexual invitation, the arms raised imploringly, her head replaced by the stripped and polished brown skull of a horse.

  In this room my Uncle Prinsep had hidden himself-from me, from my mother, from Madame de Maupassant and her set, and finally from Vera Ghillera the dancer herself, at whose feet he had sat all those years. I closed the door and went to the window. When I pulled back the curtains and looked out I could see the brick walls of the asylum, tall, and finished with spikes, washed in the orange glow of the lamplight, and hear the distant, ferocious cries of the madmen behind them.

  It was dawn. The Mari-dancers were long gone, off to Shifnal with their horse; and light was creeping down Henrietta Street like spilled milk between the cobbles. The sin-eater coughed and cleared his throat, yawned.

  His energy had left him in the night, draining his eyes to a chalky blue colour, the colour of a butterfly on the cliffs above the sea. He let his hands fall slackly in his lap and looked at the old man, who was asleep by the hearth with his mouth open. He looked at the surviving daughter, staring intently at the table then scratching patterns on it with a spoon, tongue in the corner of her mouth. He noticed the old man’s wife-laying the new fire in the grate, filling the kettle with water, making ready for the great meal of fish and potatoes which would be eaten later in the day-listening serenely to him as she went about the work, as if this were a story, not the bitter facts of his existence.

  “I left Viriconium after that,” he told her, “for the deserts in the North; and I never went back there.” He moved his shoulders suddenly, irritated perhaps because he could no longer make these events clear enough to impress her, and he was impatient with himself for continuing to speak. “Do I miss it? No: nor Sour Bridge, with its dull farmers treading mud in the shuttered drawing rooms.”

  Frost, fog, the smell of the distant shore; dawn creeping down Henrietta Street like milk. He could hear the people raking up their fires, uncovering the mirrors and birdcages. They rubbed their hands briskly as they looked out at the morning. “If the wind changes later we shall have a fine day.” At last they could shut the doors and get a bit of warmth! The little dead girl lay safely on the blue and white cover; it remained only for someone to eat the salt.

  “One thing is odd, though,” he said. “When I sat in my uncle’s rooms and looked back over the decisions which had led me there, I saw clearly that at every turn they had been made by the dying and the dead; and I swore I would leave all that behind me.”

  He stared for a moment almost pleadingly at the woman.

  “As you see, I have not.”

  She smiled: her child was safe; its soul was secure; she was content.

  “That was where I first ate the salt,” he said bleakly. “It lay on her breast as surely as it lies now on your dead daughter’s. I don’t know why my uncle put it there for me to find.”

  Later in the morning a wind from the land got up and blew light dashes of rain across the windows, but they were soon gone, and it was a fine day. Full of potatoes and fish, tired perhaps but comfortably settled in the stomach, the sin-eater picked up his bag and swung it over his shoulder. He had taken his money and put it in his pocket. Behind him at the trestle tables in the street he could hear laughter, the clatter of plates, the beginnings of music. He breathed deeply, shrugged, made a gesture with his hands, all at once, as if to convey to himself his own sense of freedom.

  He was not after all that boy from Sour Bridge, or his Uncle Prinsep. A stocky, energetic man of middle height, he whistled off down Henrietta Street, ready to walk as far as he could. He looked inland, at the hills looming through squalls of rain. Soon he would climb up among them and let the wind blow those clean, childish little sins out of him and away.

  LORDS OF MISRULE

  “Aid from the city is our only hope now,” the Yule Greave said, looking away over the empty moorland and rough grazing seamed with tree-filled cloughs.

  He was a tall man, fortyish, with weak blue eyes and a straggle of thin blond hair, who breathed laboriously through his mouth. Under the old queen, who had given him the house and the pasture that went with it, he had been known as a fighter. Every so often he would look around him as if surprised to find himself where he was, and his lower lip trembled if he talked about the city.

  To give him time to catch his breath I stopped and looked back down at his house. It was built on a curious pattern like an ideogram from one of the old languages, ramified, peculiar. Much of it now lay abandoned and overgrown in a tangle of elder and hawthorn and ivy. Flung out from it were four great stone avenues, each a mile long. I wondered who had built them, and when. It seemed a pointless act out here.

  “I’ve been forced to grub up pavements,” he said. “Knock down a wall here and there. But you can see what it was like.”

  There were deep muddy furrows in the gateways where the stone carts went in and out. The wind came in gusts from the south and west, bringing a rainy smell and the distant bleat of sheep. The dwarf oaks on the slopes above us shifted their branches uneasily and sent down a few more of last winter’s brownish withered leaves. One of the little grey kestrels of the moorland launched itself from some rocks above us, planing downwind with its wingtips ragged against the racing white clouds; it hovered for a moment, then veered off and dropped like a stone onto something in the bracken below.

  “Look!” I said.

  The Yule Greave stood wiping his face and nodding vaguely.

  “To tell you the truth,” he said, “we never thought they would come this far. We expected you to stop them before this.”

  I breathed in the smell of the bracken. “This is such a beautiful valley,” I said.

  “You’ll be able to see the whole of it soon,” t
he Yule Greave said. He started up the slope where it steepened for its final climb to the rim of the escarpment, following a soft, peaty sheep-trod through the bracken. He placed one foot carefully and heavily in front of the other, grunting at the steeper places. “I’m sorry to bring you all this way,” he said. “I don’t expect you’re used to this sort of thing.”

  “I’m not tired,” I said.

  If I had been cold, he hardly noticed. He laughed unoffendedly.

  “They’ll want a report from you,” he said. “Up here it’s easier to appreciate the scale of the problem. As a military man you’ll want to be able to judge for yourself, and not rely on the ideas of an old cutthroat.”

  We climbed the last few yards to the little outcrop, and at the top, when I turned, the spring sun had come out briefly; I could feel it like a poultice down the side of my jaw. Sweat poured down the Yule Greave’s forehead and into his eyes. He put one hand against the rock to steady himself.

  “They quarried this to build the house,” he said. “A long time ago.”

  The rock was pale, coarse-textured, full of little quartz pebbles. Higher up in the quarried bays hung mats of ivy.

  “Now you can see what I mean,” he said.

  I was more interested in his house, which lay like a metaphor in the wide flat valley. It was a light fawn colour. Its four vast avenues of stone thrust out from it across the old alluvial bench, black, black. What it meant I had no idea. It was one of those places where the past speaks to us in a language so completely of its own we have no hope of understanding. Puddles of water in the worn paving reflected the sky; I could see the gaps in the walls, like bites, where the Yule Greave had taken stone for the fortifications, a line of hasty revetments and trenches stretching across the valley lower down, where it sloped away to the south.