Viriconium (24 page)

My dear when the grass rolls in tubular billows
And the face of the ewe lamb bone white in the meadows
Sickens and slithers down into the mallows
Murder will soothe us and settle our fate;
Hallowed and pillowed in the palm of tomorrow
We tremble and trouble the hearts of the hollow:
The teeth of the tigers that stalk in the shallows
Encrimson the foam at the fisherman’s feet!

No one paid him any attention. Hornwrack sat slumped at the edge of the room where he could keep an eye on both door and window (he expected nobody—it was a precaution—it was a habit), his long white hand curled round the handle of a black jug, a smile neglected on his thin lips. Though he loathed and mistrusted Verdigris he was faintly amused by this characteristic display. The poet now choked on his horrid extemporary, mid-line. He was becoming exhausted, staring about like a bullock in an abattoir, moving here and there in little indecisive runs beneath the strange Californium frescoes. Only Hornwrack and Chorica nam Vell Ban were left to importune; he hesitated then turned to the woman, with her pinched face and remote eyes. She will give him nothing, thought Hornwrack. Then we shall see how badly off he really is.

“I
dined
with the hertis-Padnas,” she explained confidentially, not looking at Verdigris as he bobbed uxoriously about in front of her. “They were too kind.” She seemed to see him for the first time, and her imbecile smile opened like a flower.

“Muck and filth!” screamed Verdigris. “I didn’t ask for a social calendar!”

Shivering, he forced himself to face Hornwrack.

A grey shadow materialised behind him at the door and wavered there like some old worn lethal dream.

Hornwrack flung his chair back against the wall and fumbled for his plain steel knife. (Moonlight trickled down its blade and dripped from his wrist.) Verdigris, who had not seen the shadow in the doorway, gaped at him in grotesque surprise. “No, Hornwrack,” he said. His tongue, like a little purple lizard, came out and scuttled round his lips. “Please. I only wanted—”

“Get out of my way,” Hornwrack told him. “Go on.”

Scarlet crest shaking with relief, he gave a great desperate shout of laughter and sprang away in time to give Hornwrack one good look at the figure which now tottered through the door.

A thin skin only, taut as a drumhead, separates us from the future: events leak through it reluctantly, with a faint buzzing sound, if they make any noise at all—like the wind in an empty house before rain. Much later, when an irreversible process of change had hold of them both, he was to learn her name—Fay Glass, of the House of Sleth, famous a thousand and more years ago for its unimaginably oblique acts of cruelty and compassion. But for now she was a mere faint echo of the yet-to-occur, a Reborn Woman with eyes of a fearful honesty, haphazardly cropped hair an astonishing lemon colour, and a carriage awkward to the point of ugliness and absurdity (as if she had forgotten, or somehow never learned, how a human being stands). Her knees and elbows made odd and painful angles beneath the thick velvet cloak she wore; her thin fingers clutched some object wrapped in waterproof cloth and tied up with a bit of coloured leather. Muddy and travel-stained, there she stood, in an attitude of confusion and fear, blinking at Hornwrack’s knife proffered like a sliver of midnight and true murder in the eccentric Californium shadows; at Verdigris’s disgusting red crest; at Mooncarrot and his kid gloves, smiling and whispering delightedly, “Hello, my dear. Hello, my little damp parsnip—”

“I,” she said. She fell down like a heap of sticks.

Verdigris was on her at once, slashing open the bundle even as her fingers relaxed.

“What’s this?” he muttered to himself. “No money! No money!” With a sob he threw it high into the air. It turned over once or twice, landed with a thud, and rolled into a corner.

Hornwrack went up and kicked him off. “Go home and rot, Verdigris.” He gazed down thoughtfully.

Perhaps a decade after the successful conclusion of the War of the Two Queens it had become apparent that a large proportion of the Reborn could not manage the continual effort necessary to separate their dreams, their memories, and the irrevocable present in which they now discovered themselves. Some illness or dislocation had visited them during the long burial. No more, it was decided, should be resurrected until the others had found a cure for this disability. In the interim the worst afflicted would leave the city to form communes and self-help groups dotted across the uplands and along the littorals of the depopulated North. It was a callous and unsatisfactory solution, except to those who felt most threatened by the Reborn; ramshackle and interim as it was, however, it endured—and here we find them seventy years on, in deserted estuaries full of upturned fishing boats and hungry gulls, under fretted fantastic gritstone edges and all along the verges of the Great Brown Waste—curious, flourishing, hermetic little colonies, some dedicated to music or mathematics, others to weaving and the related arts, others still to the carving of enormous mazes out of the sodden clinker and blowing sands of the waste. All practise, besides, some form of the ecstatic dancing first witnessed by Tomb the Dwarf in the Great Brain Chamber at Knarr in the Lesser Rust Desert.

The search for a cure is forgotten, the attempt to come to terms with Evening abandoned. They prefer now to drift, to surrender themselves to the currents of that peculiar shifting interface between past, present, and wholly imaginary: acting out partial memories of the Afternoon and weaving into them whatever fragments of the Evening they are able to perceive. Privately they call this twilight country of perception “the margins,” and some believe that by committing themselves wholly to it they will in the end achieve not only a complete liberation from linear Time but also some vast indescribable affinity with the very fabric of the “real.” They are mad, to all intents and purposes: but perfectly hospitable.

From one of these communities Fay Glass had come, down all the long miles to the South. The weird filaments of silver threading the grey velvet of her cloak; her inability to articulate; her palpable confusion and
petit
mal
: all spoke eloquently of her origins. But there was nothing to explain what had brought her here, or why she had failed to contact the Reborn of the city (who without exception—full of guilt perhaps over their abandonment of their cousins—would have fêted and cared for her as they did every visitor from the North); nothing to account for her present pitiable condition. Hornwrack touched her gently with the toe of his boot. “Lady?” he said absently. He did not precisely “care”—he was, after all, incapable of that—but the night had surprised him, presenting him with a face he had never seen (or wanted to see) before: his curiosity had been piqued for the first time in many years.

The city caught its breath; the blue hollow lunar glow, streetlight of some necrotic, alternate Viriconium, flickered; and when at last something prompted him to look up again, the servants of the Sign were before him, filing in dumb processional through the chromium Californium door.

Chorica nam Vell Ban left her table hurriedly and went to sit beside Lord Mooncarrot, whom she loathed. Her shoulders were as thin as a coat hanger and from the folds of her purple dress there fluttered like exotic moths old invitation cards with deckled edges and embossed silver script. Mooncarrot for his part dropped both his rancid smile and his yellow gloves—
plop!
—and now found himself too rigid to pick them up again. Under the table these two fumbled for one another’s shaking hands, to clasp them in a tetanus of anxiety and self-interest while their lips curled with mutual distaste and their curdled whispers trickled across the room.

“Hornwrack, take care!”

(Much later he was to realise that even this simple counsel was enmeshed in incidental entendres. Not that it matters: at the time it was already too late to follow.)

“Take care, Hornwrack!” advised a voice of wet rags and bile, a voice which had plumbed the gutters of its youth for inspiration and never clambered out again. It was Verdigris, sidling up behind him to hop and shuffle like a demented flamingo at the edge of vision. What abrupt desperate betrayal was he nerving himself up for? What unforgivable retreat? “Oh, go away,” said Hornwrack. He felt like a man at the edge of some crumbling sea cliff, his back to the drop and the unknown waves with the foam in their teeth. “What do you want here?” he asked the servants of the Sign.

By day they were drapers, dull and dishonest; by day they were bakers. Now, avid-eyed, as hollow and expectant as a vacuum, they stood in a line regarding the woman at his feet with a kind of damp, empty longing, their faces lumpen and ill-formed in the hideous light—moulded, it seemed, from some impure or desecrated white wax—weaving about on long thin necks, grunting and squinting in a manner half-apologetic, half-aggressive. Their spokesman, their priest or tormentor, was a beggar with the ravaged yellow mask of a saint. A surviving member of the original cabal, he wielded extensive financial power though he lived on the charity of certain important Houses of the city. A rich bohemian in his youth, he had refuted the ultimate reality even of the self (staggering, after nights of witty and irreproachable polemic, down the ashen streets at dawn, afraid to destroy himself lest by that he should somehow acknowledge that he had lived). He no longer interpreted but rather embodied the Sign, and when he stood forward and began to work his reluctant jaws back and forth, it spoke out of him.

“You do not exist,” it said, in a voice like a starving imbecile, articulating slowly and carefully, as if speech were a new invention, a new unlooked-for interruption of the endless reedy Song. “You are dreaming each other.” It pointed to the woman. “She is dreaming you all. Give her up.” It swallowed dryly, clicking its lips, and became still.

Before Hornwrack could reply, Verdigris—who, filled by circumstance with a bilious and lethal despair, had indeed been nerving himself up, although not for a betrayal—stepped unexpectedly out of the shadows. He had had a bad afternoon at the cards with Fat Mam Etteilla; verse was scraping away at the wards of his skull like a picklock in a rusty keyhole; he was a rag of a man, in horror of himself and everything else that lived. To the spokesman of the Sign he offered a ridiculous little bow. “Pigs are dreaming you, you tit-suckers!” he sneered, and, squawking like a drunken juggler, winked up at Hornwrack.

Hornwrack was astonished.

“Verdigris, are you mad?”

“You’re done for, at least!” was all the poet said. “It’s black murder now.” A perverted grin crossed his face. “Unless—”

Suddenly he extended a dirty avaricious claw, palm upwards, calloused and ink-stained from the pen. “If you want her you’ll have to pay for her, Hornwrack!” he hissed. “You can’t fight them on your own.” He glanced sideways at the Sign, shuddered. “Those eyes!” he whispered. “Quick,” he said, “before my guts turn to prune juice. Enough for a bed, enough for a bottle, and I’m your man! Eh?” As he watched Hornwrack’s incomprehension dissolve into disgust, he shivered and sobbed. “You can’t fight them on your own!”

Hornwrack looked at him. He looked down at Fay Glass, insensible yet invested—a mysterious engine of fate. He looked at the spokesman of the Sign. He shrugged.

“Peddle your knife somewhere else,” he told the poet. “These people have never had cause to quarrel with me. They should remember that. They have made a simple mistake in the identity of this unfortunate woman (who is a cousin of mine, I now see, from Soubridge), and they are leaving.”

He stood there feeling surprised. He had meant to say something else.

“You do not exist,” whispered the Sign.

Ansel Verdigris chuckled.

Shadows flickered on the wall. Knives were out in the eerie light.

“Oh, very well,” sighed Galen Hornwrack. “Very well.”

Possessed by the sudden instinctive cannibalism of the baboon (our unshakable mahout, seated in the skull these million centuries), the combatants throw themselves at one another: the flesh parting like lips, wounds opening like avid mouths, precious fluids of the heart spent in one quick salivation; the bloody flux . . .

Hornwrack watches at the celebration of his own genius, helpless and a little awed. He has done nothing during his self-imposed exile from humanity if not learn his trade. A cold, manufactured rage, counterfeit of an emotion without which he cannot do his work, laps him round. The good steel knife, conjured from its sheath like a memory, settles comfortably in his hand. He can no longer influence himself, and treads the measures of his trade—the cut, the leap, the feint. Like a juggler in the Atteline Plaza he tumbles to avoid the despairing counterstroke (the blade whickering in beneath his cheekbone, the displaced air brushing feather-like his hollowed cheek). Blood fountains in the mad Californium light, the colour of old plums. That is no new colour. (All the while the girl lay between his shuffling feet like a stone, her eyes full of pain and disbelief.) The knife goes home, and goes home again in the queasy gloom. His blood is now inextricably mixed with that of the Sign, daubed on his bare forearms, greasy underfoot, a fraternity of murder and pain. . . .

Somewhere behind him Verdigris was struggling, his face luminous with terror, his mouth a gargoyle’s spouting a filth of verses, some drain-pipe lyric of relaxing sphincters and glazed eyes. “Remember this, Hornwrack!” he shouted. “Remember this!”

Hornwrack never heard him. Three, perhaps four, fall before him, and then the mouthpiece of the Sign squeezes into view from the bloody mêlée like a face surfacing from the bottom of a dream—long, yellow, smeared with blood, triangular and expressionless as a wasp’s—the breath huffing in and out like dry inhalations of some machine, the breath of the insect whispering the deadly symbolic secrets of the cabal, the arid rustling visions of bone and desert—until Hornwrack’s knife thumps him squarely in the hollow between collarbone and trapezius with a sound like a chisel in a block of wood, to end eighty years of fear and doubt. At the point of his death, electricity flares between them, as if the whole cabal gave up its heart in the one despairing, vomited word,