Viriconium

by Michael John Harrison

  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 hollowly. “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.”

  They drifted for some hours over the waste, heading south. Tomb the Dwarf nursed his failing vehicle with a skill almost matching that of his tutor and master (no one knew if Paucemanly had actually attempted the moon trip in his legendary boat Heavy Star: certainly, he had vanished from the face of the earth after breaking single-handed Carlemaker’s air siege of Mingulay, and most fliers had a fanatical faith in the tale . . . ) and brought them finally to Ruined Drunmore in the Pass of Methedrin, the city thrown down by Borring half a century before.

  During that limping journey, they discussed treachery:

  “If I had Norvin Trinor’s neck between my hands, I would break it lightheartedly,” said Birkin Grif, “even with pleasure, although I liked him once.”

  He winced, binding up his leg.

  “He has blackened all of us,” murmured Cromis. “As a body, the Methven have lost their credibility.”

  But the Queen said, “It is Carron Ban who has my sympathy. Women are more used to betrayal than men, but take it deeper.”

  It is the urgent and greedy desire of all wastes to expand and eat up more-fertile lands: this extension of their agonised peripheries lends them a semblance of the movement and life they once possessed. As if seeking protection from the slow southward march of the Rust Desert, Ruined Drunmore huddled against an outflung spur of the Monar Mountains.

  In this, it failed, for drifts of bitter dust topped its outer walls, spilling and trickling into the streets below every time a wind blew.

  The same winds scoured its streets, and, like an army of indifferent housekeepers, swept the sand through the open doors and shattered roofs of the inner city, choking every abandoned armoury and forge and barracks. The erosion of half a millennium had etched its cobbled roads, smoothed and blunted the outlines of its ruins, until its once-proud architecture had become vernacular, fit for its equivocal position between the mountains and the waste.

  Even as a ruin, Drunmore was pitiful: Time and geography had choked it to death.

  Towards the end of the flight, a wide rift had appeared suddenly in the deck of the airboat, exposing the ancient engines. Now, as they hovered over the city, flecks of coloured light, small writhing worms of energy, rose up out of the crack, clung to the metal surfaces of the command bridge, fastened on the inert carcass of the mechanical vulture, and clustered about the Queen’s rings.

  Tomb grew nervous. “Corpse lights,” he muttered. He brought the machine down in Luthos Plaza, the four-acre field of Time-polished granite from which Borring had organised the destruction of Drunmore so many generations before.

  Grif and Cromis dragged the dead courier from his ruined ship and buried him in a deep drift of loess on the southern side of the plaza. It was a queer and sombre business. The Queen looked on, her cowl pulled forward, her cloak fluttering. They were impelled to work slowly, for they had only their hands for shovels. As they completed the interment, great white sparks began to hiss and crackle between the shattered crystal hull and the surrounding buildings.

  “We would be wiser out of this,” suggested Tomb, who had been carrying out salvage work, as was his nature, and promptly rushed back into the wreckage to steal more tools and retrieve his exoskeleton. After that, they made their way through the bone-smooth streets until Grif could walk no further, the damp wind mourning about them and Tomb’s armour clanking funereally as he dragged it along.

  Under the one unbroken roof that remained (like a static stone haunting, like a five-hundred-year memory) in the city, amid piles of dust younger than the waste but older than the empire, they lit a fire and prepared a meal from the miserable stores of the wrecked machine. Shadows danced crudely, black on the black walls. The sun had gone down in a gout of blood.

  At the prompting of some impulse he did not quite understand, Cromis had rescued the corpse of Cellur’s bird from the ship. While they ate, he explained its nature to the Young Queen, and Tomb probed its mechanisms with a thin steel knife.

  “. . . We know nothing more of this man. But by sending the bird, he warned us—the fact that I did not heed the warning in no way devalues it—of the geteit chemosit. It may be that he has some way of dealing with them.”

  Birkin Grif chewed a strip of dried meat. He laughed.

  “That is pure conjecture,” he said.

  “It is the only hope we have. Grif. There is nothing else.” />
  “He is very clever with his hands,” cackled Tomb the Dwarf, poking at the innards of the bird. He thought for a moment. “Or, like Canna Moidart, good at digging.”

  “So, if you do not object, my lady, we will travel to Girvan Bay and solicit his aid. Should there be some secure place to which we can deliver you first—”

  “Places do not guarantee security, Lord Cromis, only people”—here, she smiled at him—“a thing we have both learned recently, I think.” He reflected ruefully that it was unwise to forget the astuteness of the House of Methven. “And, besides, I have been safe for seventeen years. I think I would like to be at risk for a while.”

  A huge, urgent lurching motion manifested itself on the other side of the fire like a local geological disturbance. Birkin Grif had heaved himself to his feet. He looked down at the Young Queen, mumbling subterraneanly to himself. He bowed from the waist.

  “Madam,” he said, “you have the courage of your father. That is a brave attitude.” He sat down again. “Mind you,” he added in a low voice to Tomb, “it’s a bloody long trip for a man in my condition.”

  Queen Jane of Viriconium laughed for the first time since she had lost her empire. Which shows at least, thought Cromis, the resilience of youth. He did not mean to condescend.

  They stayed in that city for five days. A processing centre in the heyday of the Northmen, perhaps it welcomed the ring of Tomb’s hammer as he worked on his damaged armour—a loop in Time, a faint, distorted echo from a past in which other mechanics had beaten the subtle artefacts of the Afternoon Cultures into cruder, more vital forms.

  Grif’s leg was slow to heal; exertion reopened it; the blood seemed slow to clot, and he found walking difficult. Like a convalescing child, he was prone to brief, silly rages. He limped and fretted about, railing at his own limitations. Finally, he forced himself to walk to the wreck in Luthos Plaza, tear a slim cobalt girder from the destroyed engine housing, and bend it into a crutch.

  It was an unfortunate admission. His gait thereafter was laborious, unsteady—and Tomb, a cruel humourist, imitated it gleefully, stumbling and capering like a crippled acrobat. That parody was a horrid work of art. Grif lost his temper, and implied that the power-armour was a less respectable kind of crutch. They went for one another murderously, all hooked hands and cunning blows, and had to be separated forcibly. They took to cutting each other dead in the bleak streets.

  “You are preposterous,” Cromis told them.

  To Methvet Nian he said, “They are bored with inaction; we will leave here tomorrow,” but later that day two airboats bearing the Moidart’s sigil ghosted in off the waste and hung over the plaza. Northmen swarmed down rope ladders to examine the burnt-out launch, kicked noisily through the wreckage, looking for souvenirs.

  Cromis took his small party to earth in the archaic suburbs of Drunmore. But it became apparent that the airborne force was the vanguard of an attempt to reoccupy the city after half a millennium’s absence, so they left the place that night, and went undetected into the cold spaces of the Pass of Methedrin.

  They began their journey down the Rannoch:

  It was a land of immense, barely populated glacial moors, flanked by the tall hills—of bogs and peat streams—of granite boulders split from the Mountains of Monar during slow, unimaginable catastrophes of ice, deposited to wear away in the beds of wide, fast, shallow rivers;

  Of bright green moss, and coarse, olive-green grass, and delicate, washed-out winter flowers discovered suddenly in the lee of low, worn drumlins—of bent thorn and withered bullace, of damp prevailing winds that searched for voices in stands of birch and pine;

  Of skylines, wrinkled with ridges;

  Of heather and gorse, grey cloud and weather—of sudden open stretches of white water that would swell in spring, dwindle and vanish with the coming of summer—mysterious waterways;

  It was green and brown, green and grey; it grew no crops; it constituted one quarter of the Empire of Viriconium.

  At dawn each day, Cromis would leave his blankets, shivering, to inspect whatever snares he had set the night before: generally, he caught rabbits and waterlogged his boots, but he took a morose pleasure in these solitary outings. Something in the resigned, defeated landscape (or was it simply waiting to be born? Who can tell at which end of Time these places have their existence?) called out to his senses, demanded his attention and understanding.

  He never found out what it was. Puzzling, he would return with his catch, to wake the camp and initiate another day of walking.

  They were a ragged crew, a queer crew to be walking down the Rannoch like that: Tomb crucified in his leather leggings against the metal tree of his exoskeleton, never tiring, going like a machine over bog and river, leaping ravines and cutting down whole spinneys with his axe; Birkin Grif in the ruins of his splendid cobalt mail, hopping and lurching, cursing his crutch like a mad scarecrow; Cromis, his beautiful black hair lank in the damp wind, the dead metal bird dangling limply by its neck from his belt, stopping to gaze at waterworn stone by the hour—

  And Methvet Nian in her purple cloak, discovering a portion of her lost empire, and of herself. “Towers are not everything, Lord Cromis!” she laughed, and she took his arm. “They are not!” She brought him flowers and was disappointed when he could not identify them for her. He showed her crows and mountains, and expected no identification at all. He smiled; he was not used to that. They were thrown together by small observations.

  In this way, they covered twenty miles a day.

  During the third week, it snowed. Ice crusted the rivers, rock cracked and broke above the thousand-foot line of the flanking hills. Cromis found his traps full of white hares and albino foxes with red, intelligent eyes. Birkin Grif killed a snow leopard with his crutch: for ferocity, it was an even match until the last blow.

  For a week, they lived with a community of herders, small, dark-haired folk with strange soft accents, to whom the war in the North and West was but a rumour. They gave the Queen a sheepskin coat; they were shy and kind. As a measure of gratitude, Tomb the Dwarf cut wood from dawn to dusk, while Grif sat with his bad leg stretched in front of him and split it into enough kindling for a year (they became friends again as a result of this: neither of them loved anything better than cutting and chopping).

  Everything began to seem distant: the snow was an insulator. Cromis forced himself to keep in mind the defeat in the North. It was important to his brooding nature that he remember the terrible blades of the geteit chemosit. He imagined them. He saw them lay siege to Duirinish in his head. Would the winter halt them at all?

  After seven days of that, and a further fortnight of travel in the grim mountains at the southern end of the Rannoch, he was glad to see the arable lands around Lendalfoot and catch a glimpse at last of the grey sea breaking on the dark volcanic beaches of Girvan Bay.

  Lendalfoot was a fishing town built of pale fawn stone, a cluster of one-roomed cottages and long drying sheds, their edges weathered, blurred by accumulations of moss and lichen. Here and there rose the tall white houses of local dignitaries. In the summer, fine pink sand blown off the shifting dunes of Girvan Bay filled its steep, winding streets; the fishwives argued bare-armed in the sun; and creaking carts carried the catch up the Great South Road into Soubridge.

  But now the waves bit spitefully the shingle beach. The sea heaved, the mad black gulls fought over the deserted deep-water jetties, and the moored boats jostled one another uneasily.

  Determined that news of the Young Queen should not travel north by way of the fish route, Cromis sent Tomb into Lendalfoot to pose as a solitary traveller and gather certain information (he stumped off sulkily, stripped of his power-armour so as not to alarm the fishermen, but refusing to give up his axe), then retired with Methvet Nian and Birkin Grif to a barren basalt hill behind the town.

  The dwarf returned jauntily, throwing up and catching a small, wizened apple, which had been given to him (he said) by an old woman. “She was a
s dried up as her fruit,” he laughed. “She must have thought I was a child.” More likely, he had stolen it.

  “It was a good thing I went alone: they are frightened and surly down there. News has come down the road to Soubridge.” He crunched the apple. “The Moidart has taken Low Leedale, thrown down Duirinish—with great loss of life—and now marches on Viriconium.

  “Between the Pastel City and Soubridge, the geteit chemosit are abroad by night, killing with no reason.”

  He ate the apple core, spat the pips impudently at Birkin Grif—who was sharpening his sword with a piece of sandstone he kept in his belt for that purpose—and lay down on his exoskeleton. “They have given me directions, more or less precise.” He strapped himself up, rose to his feet, once more a giant. He pointed out over the basalt cliffs, his motors humming.

  “Our goal lies east and a little inland. The fishermen cooled further toward me when they learnt of my destination: they have little like of this Cellur. He is seen rarely, an old man. They regard him superstitiously, and call him ‘The Lord of the Birds.’ ”

  8

  In each of them had grown a compulsion to avoid roads and centres of population: by this, they were driven to travel the wilderness that stretches from Lendalfoot to the Cladich Marshes—a hinterland ruined and botched when the Afternoon Cultures were nothing but a dream in the germ-plasm of an ape, a stony wreckage of deep ravines and long-dormant volcanic vents.

  “It is a poor empire I have,” said Methvet Nian, “win or lose. Everywhere, the death of the landscape. In miniature, the end of the world.”

  No one answered her, and she drew her hood over her face.

  It had not snowed in the South, but a continual rain lashed the grey and leafless vegetation, glossed the black basalt and pumice, and made its way in the form of agitated streams through the ravines to the sea. At night, electrical flares danced about the summits of the dead volcanoes, and the columnar basalt formations took on the aspect of a giant architecture.