by Tim Powers
A slow smile deepened the lines of Duffy's cheeks as he savored the memories Eilif's words woke in him: visions of mad, sweaty charges under smoke-streaked skies, of looking out over shattered battlements at the patterns of soldiers' campfires that provided the only pinpoints of light in the night of raped cities, of wild, torchlit revels in overthrown halls, and of refilling his cup from a spouting, axed brandy cask.
'Yes, Duff,' Eilif went on, 'you'll have to get in on it all. Now the Imperial troops are expected any day, but you're too dire an old wolf to march rank-and-file with that lot of sanctimonious youngsters.' The Irishman grinned at Eilif's typical mercenary's contempt for regular soldiers. 'Fortunately there are a dozen independent companies of landsknechten in town that would take you on this very minute, with the credentials you've piled up over the years; even one or two you've served with, probably. After all, lad, it's what you know best, and it's a seller's market right now.'
Before Duffy could reply, the street door swung open and a man in a long green robe swept into the room, the almond eyes in his high-cheekboned golden face darting about to scan the others present.
'What the hell is that?' demanded Eilif in an outraged tone of voice.
'Our mandarino,' Duffy told him. 'No morning here is complete without a visit from him.'
The Oriental looked anxiously across the room at Anna. 'Is there yet any word of Aurelianus?' he called.
The silent black man in the corner looked up, his eyes alight.
'No,' replied Anna patiently. 'But he is, as I've said, expected daily.'
'I think I know what it is, captain,' piped up one of Eilif's companions. 'I believe it's a snake waiting for the old wizard to smoke him.'
Amid the general hilarity that followed this, the robed man glanced scornfully at their table. 'The livestock certainly are noisy in Vienna.'
'What? Oh, livestock, is it?' roared the Swiss who'd spoken, suddenly enraged. He stood up so violently that the bench fell over behind him, spilling two of his companions onto the oak floorboards. 'Get out of here right now, monkey, or I'll make cattle feed out of you.'
The Oriental frowned, then his narrow lips curled up at the corners. 'Why, I think I'll stay.'
After a moment's pause Eilif threw two coins down on the table. 'Two Venetian ducats on our boy Bobo.'
'Covered,' said Duffy, producing two coins. The rest of the landsknechten began shouting and making bets of their own, and the Irishman kept track of the money.
Bobo kicked a few benches aside and cautiously circled the slender Oriental, who just revolved on a heel and watched impassively. Finally the Swiss leaped forward, lashing out at the other man's head with a heavy fist - but the robed man simply crouched under the rush and then instantly bounced up again with a whirl of arms that sent Bobo somersaulting through five feet of air into, and finally through, one of the leadpaned front windows. The abrupt percussive crash died away into the clink and rattle of individual pieces of glass on the cobblestones outside, and after a few moments Duffy could hear Bobo's gasping
groans wafting in with the cold breeze that now swept through the hole.
'If there is no one else interested in discussing the price of cattle feed,' said the victor politely, 'I think I'll leave you after all.' There were no takers, so he bowed and walked out of the room. Duffy gathered in the coins on the table top and began doling them out among himself and the two others who'd bet against Bobo.
There was a quick thumping down the stairs, and then the innkeeper's voice screeched, 'What the hell's going on? Duffy, why aren't you preventing this?'
'He's taking bets on it,' growled one of the losers.
'Oh, of course!' said Werner with an exaggerated nod. 'What else would a bouncer do? Listen to me, you old wreck: when Aurelianus gets back here - pray God it's soon! - you are going to be unemployed. Do you follow me?'
The Irishman pocketed his share and picked up Epiphany's bundle. 'I do.' After bowing to the company he crossed to the door and stepped outside. The air still had a bite of morning chill in it, but the sun was well up in the cloudless sky and steam was curling from the shingles of nearby roofs.
Bobo had got up on his hands and knees and was crawling toward the door. Duffy dropped several coins where he'd be sure to come across them, and then strode off, whistling.
Under the gaiety, the Irishman had been obscurely depressed all morning, as he always was when he intended to look in on Epiphany's invalid father. What is it, he asked himself now, that upsets me about the old artist? I guess it's mainly the smell of doom that clings to him. He's so clearly on the downward side of Fortune's wheel -studied under Castagno in his youth, was praised by Dürer himself ten years. ago, and now he's a drunkard going blind, drawing on the walls of his tawdry Schottengasse room.
As Duffy turned down the Wallnerstrasse a couple of mongrels smelled the food in the cloth-wrapped package he was carrying, and pranced around him as he walked. The street became wider as it neared the northwest face of the city wall, and the Irishman made his way right down the middle of it, following the gutter, weaving around vegetable carts and knots of yelling children. Where is it, he thought, craning his neck; I'm always afraid I've passed it. Ah, right here. He shook his free arm menacingly. 'Off with you, dogs, this is where we part company.'
Edging his way out of the traffic flow and pushing open the creaking boarding house door, the Irishman stepped reluctantly out of the morning sunlight and into the stale-smelling dimness of the entryway. Maybe, he thought, what bothers me is the possibility that I'll be like this myself soon, living in a crummy hole and mumbling jumbled memories to people who aren't listening anyway.
He crossed the dusty entry, stepped through the stairway door - and froze.
In front of him, beyond a narrow beach, stretched away to the horizon a vast, listless lake or sea, reflecting with nearly no distortion the full moon that hung in the deep night sky.
Duffy's stunned mind scrabbled for an explanation like an atheist at the Second Coming. I was slugged from behind, he thought, and brought here (Where's here? There's no body of water this size within a hundred miles of Vienna) and I've been unconscious for hours. I just now came to, and I'm trying to get away.
He took two paces toward the lake and tripped painfully over the bottom steps of an old wooden stairway. Leaping to his feet, he stared around him bewilderedly at the close
walls and the stairs. He ran back through the entry hail to the street, stared hard at the front of the building, the crowded sunlit street and the blue sky, and then slowly walked back inside.
He winced when he stepped again into the stairwell, but the old, peeling walls remained solid, almost sneering at him in their mundanity. He clumped hurriedly up to the second floor and knocked on the door of Vogel's room. Then he knocked again.
A full minute after his third and loudest series of knocks, a chain rattled and the door swung inward, revealing the cluttered mess of blankets, books, bottles and paper-rolls that Duffy had always seen there.
'Who is it?' rasped the ancient, scruffy-bearded man who now poked his head around the edge of the door.
'It's Brian Duffy, Gustav. I've brought you food and ink.'
'Ah, good, good - Come in, son. Did you bring any...?' He did a pantomime of sucking at the neck of a bottle.
'I'm afraid not. Just ink.' He held up the ink pot. 'This is ink. Don't drink it this time, eh?'
'Of course, of course,' Vogel said absently. 'I'm glad you happened to drop by today. I want to show you how The Death of Archangel Michael is coming along.' Duffy recalled visiting the old artist two weeks ago, for the first time in three years, and being greeted with the same casual 'Glad you happened to drop by today.'
'Come on,' the old man wheezed. 'Tell me what you think of it.'
The Irishman allowed himself to be led to the far wall, which was fitfully illuminated by two candles. Filling the wall entirely, from floor to ceiling and corner to corner, drawn with painstaking care on the pl
aster in a near-infinity of fine, close-knit penstrokes, was a vast picture.
Duffy gave a polite glance to the maelstrom of churning figures. When he had first seen the picture, possibly seven years ago, he'd had to look close to see the faint outlines of the shapes on the white plaster; and when he left Vienna in 'twenty-six the wall was a finely shaded drawing, crowded and vague in subject but faultless in execution. Now it was much darker, for every day the artist added hundreds of strokes, deepening shadows and, very gradually, blacking out some peripheral figures altogether. Three years ago the scene pictured seemed to be occurring at noon; now the tortured figures writhed and gestured in the shade of deep twilight.
'It's coming along wonderfully, Gustav,' Duffy said.
'You think so? Good! Naturally your opinion counts in this,' the old man chittered eagerly. 'I've invited Albrecht to come and see it, but lately he hasn't even been answering my letters. I'm nearly finished, you see. I've got to complete the thing before I lose my sight entirely.'
'Couldn't you call it finished now?'
'Oh no! You don't know about these things, young man. No, it needs a good deal of work yet.'
'If you say so. Here, I'll stash this food in your pantry. Don't forget it's there, either!' Still looking at the old man, Duffy pulled open the door of the narrow pantry; a gust of fresh, cold air, carrying a smell like the sea, ruffled his hair from behind, and he closed the door without turning around. 'On second thought,' he said, a little unsteadily, 'I'll let you put it away.'
Epiphany's father, intent on touching up the shading of a cloud, wasn't even listening. Duffy ran a hand nervously through his hair, then laid a small stack of coins on a box that seemed to be serving as a table, and left the room. Descending the stairs he was careful to stare straight ahead, and he won his way to the street without being subjected to any more visions.
He strode unhappily back toward the Zimmermann Inn.
What, he asked himself, almost ready to cry, is going on? Until today I hadn't seen any outré things in nearly a month. I'd hoped I was through with all that. And at least those satyrs, griffins and unseen nightfliers last month were, I think, real, since other people saw or were affected- by them. But what about this damnable lake? Would another person have seen that? Maybe I'm crazy and haunted. That's it. Epiphany, will you take an insane husband to match your father?
From the walls came echoing the boom of cannons as Bluto and his crew of assistants tested the city's artillery for range. I wonder, Duffy thought, not for the first time, if the Turks really will try for Vienna this year. I suppose they will. And what with the shape the old Holy Roman Empire's in, they'll probably sweep right through and be in Ireland in two years. I should take Eilif's advice - just throw myself into the tide of warfare and keep too busy to go mad.
The soldiers were rowdy downstairs, shouting for the casks of bock to be opened just two days early, and the clamor eventually helped rouse the Irishman from his unusually deep and prolonged afternoon nap. He stared at the ceiling for a few moments and tried to remember what dream it was that had left him with such an oppressive, though unfocused, sense of dread.
There came a rapping at his door. 'Mr Duffy,' called Shrub, the stable boy. 'Werner says come down or be evicted tonight.'
'Coming, Shrub.' He was glad of even this annoying interruption, for it was a summons to rejoin the world, and for a moment the world had seemed on the point of going to bits like a scene painted on shredding canvas. 'I'm coming.' He put on his boots and sword and left the room.
At the door to the dining hall he paused to run his hands
through his gray hair and shake his head a couple of times. Odd, he thought - I feel as if I'm still half asleep.. .as if that damned dream, the one I can't remember, is still going on, and is in some way more real than my perceptions of this old door, my hands, and the smell of cooking beef in the warm air.
'Don't hang back,' came Anna's cheerfully exasperated voice from behind him. 'Push on.'
He obediently stepped through into the wide hail and moved aside for her to pass with her tray of pitchers. All the candles were lit in the cressets and wooden chandeliers, and the long room was packed with customers of every sort, from foreign mercenaries with odd accents to middle-aged merchants sweating under the weight of many-pocketed display coats. Probably a third of the company had upturned their empty or nearly-empty mugs, and Anna and two other women were kept busy refilling them. Several dogs who had got in somehow were grow- I ling and bickering for scraps under the tables.
It struck Duffy that a touch of hysteria had sharpened the good-fellowship tonight, as if the night wind whistling under the eaves carried some pollen of impermanence, making everyone nostalgic for things they hadn't lost yet.
A tableful of young students near the bar had struck up a song, a cheery sounding number with lyrics in Latin:
'Feror ego veluti
Sine nauta navis,
Ut per vias aeris
Vaga fertur avis;
Non me tenent vincula,
Non me tenet clavis,
Quero mihi similes
Et adjungor pravis!'
Calling on his rusty seminary skill, the Irishman was. a little appalled when he translated it in his head:
I am carried violently off
Like a captainless ship,
Just as down the highways of the sky
A vagrant bird is driven.
I am not held by any fetters
Or secured by any key.
I look for others like me,
And my companions are distorted outcasts.
He frowned, and abandoned as hopeless the notion of finding an uncrowded bench. He decided to sit in the kitchen and just listen for sounds of major unrest.
Catching the eye of one of the serving women as she was sidling past, the Irishman called over the din, 'Do you know if Epiphany's in the kitchen?'
A drink-ruddied face looked up from beside Duffy's elbow. 'No, she's not,' the man put in merrily. 'She was under the table here a minute ago...' With a helpful air he peered around his feet. 'Gone! Run off with Werner's mastiff, I expect, and there'll be another litter of pups. about the place before long. Now a leash would -The Irishman's hand shot out and seized the knot of the
man's wool scarf. With a rolling heave of his shoulders Duffy hauled the choking man right up out of his place, held him briefly overhead as he re-planted his feet, and then pitched the whimpering figure twisting through the air to violently sweep the beer mugs off a nearby table before crashing to the floor, which resounded like a great drum..
The roar of conversation halted abruptly, then resumed much louder. Casting his glance defiantly over the crowd, the Irishman happened to catch the narrowed eyes of the Oriental who'd dealt with Bobo that morning. Yes, Duffy thought, what with the mandarino and myself there have been a lot of people flying through the air around here lately. Then, catching a glint of speculation in the sardonic gaze, the Irishman suddenly realized something. Whatever it is, he thought, that's got me so keyed up - this frustration or anticipation or foreboding - that man shares it.
Werner was beginning to voice hysterical protestations on the far side of the hail, so Duffy turned and strode through the steamy kitchen and out the back door into the stable yard.
That was a damn fool thing to do, he reflected. Flying into a boyfriend-rage like some teenager. Where's my self control these days?
He breathed deeply the chilly air of evening, staring west over the high roof of the city hall toward the diming-to-black tiers of the sunset. In some land over there it's broad daylight, he told himself. Night rushing up behind me and day so distant in front.
Was that the scuff of a footstep? He turned and noticed a wooden bucket rocking where it hung on the brewery door. Ah, he thought, just a delivery. Probably the butter Anna's been expecting, hung on the wrong door by mistake. Well, Shrub can carry it in tomorrow morning, I don't want to be meeting anyone just at the moment. Glancing up, he was reas
sured to see the thickening
cloud cover. Best not to stand under the open sky in times like these, he thought. Pull all available covers right up over your head.
A breeze flitted through the yard, and the tang of gunpowder smoke stung his nostrils. Instinctively he spun and glanced about, then leaped to the bucket on the door. A fuse was poking out of it from under the hammered down wooden lid, and quickly disappeared inside, sputtering like a grease-fire, even as the Irishman let out a yell and lifted the bucket off the hook. Though it weighed a good thirty pounds, Duffy pitched the thing one-handed across the yard, letting the momentum of the throw fling him face down onto the cobblestones.
A flash and deafening crack split the night, and splinters, spinning boards and bits of stone rebounded from the inn walls and clattered down into the yard as the explosion's roar echoed away through the dark streets. Duffy sat up, coughing in the dust-and-smoke-choked air, and blood spilled down his cheek from a gash a flying bit of wood had laid open in his forehead. He lurched to his feet and drew his sword, half expecting a rush of hostile figures from out of the darkness. The only rush, though, was from the kitchen door behind him, as a knot of serving girls and customers elbowed their way outside to see what had happened.
One voice, Werner's cut through the babble. He pushed several people aside and stepped to the front. 'God damn you, Duffy!' he shouted. 'What have you done now? It wasn't enough to break my windows this morning, now you have to blow up half my stable? Get out of my house, you lazy, drunken son of a bitch!' By way of punctuation he punched the Irishman in his broad chest.
'Ho!' called someone in the crowd. 'Werner's got a savage side!'
Duffy barely felt the blow, but something seemed to burst in his head. 'City-bred dog!' he roared, all thoughts of explanation flown. 'Will you lay hands on me? On me? Run, vermin, and rejoice I won't foul my sword with your whore's-spit blood!'
