Viriconium (49 page)

And, when he saw Ashlyme staring at him helplessly:

“I want you to do my portrait, Master Ashlyme. You are the one to catch me as I am!”

He was an exasperating subject, full of nervous energy and forever dissatisfied with his pose. He began by standing up, one hand stretched out like a populist orator. Then he sat down and put his chin on his hand. But soon that was not good enough for him either and he had to stand up again to display the muscles of his upper back. At first he thought too much light was falling on him to emphasise the essential duality of his character, then too little to bring out the line of his jaw. He smiled until he remembered that this would reveal his teeth, then frowned. “I cannot decide how to present myself,” he admitted, with a sigh. He was talking constantly.

“Do you know why I am so handsome?” he would ask. “It is because of the straightness of my legs.”

It was clear that he hated and feared his masters. One of his favourite topics was the steel ring he wore on the thumb of his right hand. It was a wicked object, with a sharpened spur mounted on it instead of a stone. His employers, he hinted darkly, had attacked him before; the day would come when he would have to fear them again. Suddenly he leapt to his feet and cried, “Imagine the scene! I am attacked! I slash at the forehead of my opponent! Immediately
his own blood
fills his eyes, and I have him where I want him!”

He accompanied this explanation with a violent sweep of his arm, which knocked over a little pewter vase of anemones.

This was how they passed the rest of the night. Extra lamps were brought in at Ashlyme’s request, and at the dwarf’s a tray of aniseed cakes and a preparation he called “housemaid’s coffee,” made of heavily sugared milk heated slowly while buttered toast was crumbled into it and then browned until it formed a thick crust. This he drank with great gusto, rolling his eyes and rubbing his diaphragm, while Ashlyme watched him covertly from behind the easel, yawning and pretending to draw. As the room cooled, the cats crowded round him, or ran about picking up the pieces of food he threw them.

Towards dawn there was a dull crash outside the building. The dwarf got up and went hurriedly into the adjoining room. Ashlyme found him standing on tiptoe on the little balcony, looking down at the Barley brothers. “Give us a tune, dwarf!” they shouted. “Give us a story!” Drunken singing came up, mixed with laughter and dry retching sounds. They tried to scale the rotten wall below the balcony. They redoubled their efforts to get the door open, and a hollow booming echoed away across the deserted building sites of Montrouge. The dwarf greeted this without a word, staring out over the rooftops, his jaw muscles twitching spasmodically. Ashlyme, intimidated, kept quiet.

Doors opened and closed elsewhere in the tower. Servants ran about. Eventually it was quiet again, but the dwarf stood on at the railing. When he turned away at last it was apparent that he had expected to find himself alone. He regarded Ashlyme with blank hatred for a moment, then said effortfully, “Do you see how they plague me? I won’t have them in my portrait. Hurry. It will spoil everything if they find you here!”

Ashlyme nodded and went to fetch his easel.

The dwarf stood in the doorway watching him pack chalks and paper. “What’s your game in the plague zone, Ashlyme?” he asked quietly. His expression was detached. When he saw Ashlyme’s confusion he laughed. “Go anywhere you like! My men will leave you alone unless I order it. But don’t forget your new commission.”

Outside, the night was totally silent; and as Ashlyme picked his way between the derelict towers and rubbish-filled trenches, it seemed to him that the whole city had shrunk to a black dot on the vast featureless map of the end of the world.

This week,
he wrote in his journal,
the High City can think of nothing but the
Barley brothers. What they wear, where they go, what they do when they get
there, all this is suddenly of paramount interest. The most vexing question is:
where do they live? Yesterday at Angina Desformes’s I was told in confidence
that the Barleys live in a workman’s hut in the cisPontine Quarter; this
morning I learned to the contrary that they stay on a houseboat down at Line
Mass and spend their time throwing things in the canal. Tomorrow I expect to
hear that they have bought all the houses on Uranium Street, where, in a
grave beneath the pavement, they have secretly arranged a sepulchre for themselvesand their dwarf . . .

It was a silly preoccupation, he felt, and one which could only confirm the Barley brothers in their bad behaviour.
Now that I have visited the
tower in Montrouge, and seen the curious roadworks beyond the Haadenbosk,
he added,
I do not encourage such speculation.
To the extent that he could, he pushed his encounter with the Grand Cairo out of his mind. He was not anxious to admit, perhaps, that the pattern of his life could be so easily disturbed. As an antidote he worked hard at his round of commissions in Mynned.

Most of these,
he recorded,
are middle-aged women, bored, educated,
“artistic.” I am quite the fashion with them. At present, of course, they are besottedby the Barley brothers, and filled with delighted fear by the proximity of
the plague zone: but they remain eager to talk about Paulinus Rack, who is
still their darling despite the growing row over
Die Traumunden Knaben,
which many of them consider too risqué a production to be put on the High
City. Like all of us, Rack relies for his funding on these women, and his feet
are getting colder by the minute. If the play fails, Audsley King will fail with
it.
The Dreaming Boys
are her last link with the High City, her last investmentin life rather than death. The women of Mynned, who have not thought
about this, are scandalised by what they imagine her plight to be. May they
send her money? they enquire of me. “I’m afraid it is against quarantine regulations,” I tell them. They find this quite unsatisfactory.

He always lost two or three of these clients when the finished portrait turned out a little less “sympathetic” than they had expected.

“La Petroleuse” complains that I have made her look provincial. I have
not. I have given her the face of a grocer, which is another matter entirely,
and in no way a judgement. There are so many other things to think about
that I cannot regret it. Audsley King seems lower in spirit every time I see her.
Emmet Buffo is anxious about his part in our plan, and lately has sent me
several letters on the subject of disguises. He does not want to enter the zone
without one. He thinks we should both have one. He knows where there is an
old man who can get them for us.

After some thought Ashlyme decided, I don’t care for this idea. Nevertheless, to Buffo he wrote,
I will meet you to see this man as soon as
I can get away
.

It was a cool, bright morning in the High City.

“How lucky you are to live up here!” exclaimed Buffo. “The plague hardly seems to have changed anything.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Ashlyme.

“Well, I love to come here,” Buffo insisted, “especially if I’ve been working all night. Look: there’s Livio Fognet on his way to lunch at the Charcuterie Vivien.” He waved cheerfully. “Not a care in the world!”

Buffo was tall and thin, with a loose, uncoordinated gait which made him look as if the wrong legs had been attached to him at birth. His face was clumsy and long-jawed, he had limp fair hair and a pale complexion. Years of staring through homemade lenses had given his eyes a sore and vulnerable look. His researches, which had something to do with the moon, were regarded with derision in the High City. He did not suspect this. Lately, though, he had been short of funds. It had made him absentminded; when he thought no one was watching him his face became slack and empty of expression.

“You even have better weather in Mynned,” he went on, stretching, expanding his chest, and blinking round in the weak sunlight. “It’s always so windy where I live.” He had bought himself a pound of plums and was eating them as he went along. “I don’t know why I like plums so much,” he said. “Did you see the sky just after dawn today? Extraordinary!”

They were on their way to the cisPontine Quarter, a Low City district as yet untouched by the plague. To get there they had to cross Mynned and go down to the canal. It had rained quite heavily an hour or so before. As they made their way between the deserted quays and warehouses, the eggshell colours of the sky were reflected in the puddles on the towpath. A coolish breeze blew across the lock basin at Line Mass, giving it something of the windy spaciousness of a much larger body of water and reminding Ashlyme without warning of the Midland Levels, where he had been born. He thought suddenly of bitter winter floods, eels coiled fat and unmoving in the mud, and herons standing motionless along the silvery margins of the willow carrs. He shivered.

Buffo was describing the man they were going to meet.

“He is a great collector of stuffed birds. He makes them, too. He sells, among other things, the clothes the beggars wear. He lives behind ‘Our Lady of the Zincsmiths,’ and thinks as I do that the future of the world lies with science.” (Ashlyme, hearing only the word
future,
looked guiltily in the direction Buffo happened to be pointing. He saw only an old lock gate, behind which had collected a creamy brown curd full of floating rubbish.) “His researches take him into the old towers of the city, and their derelict upper floors. You will not believe this, Ashlyme, but there among the jackdaw colonies and sparrows’ nests he claims to have found living birds whose every feather is made of metal!”

“He should avoid those old towers,” said Ashlyme. “They can be dangerous.”

“It’s interesting work, though. Do you want the last plum or can I have it?”

Presently they came to the cisPontine Quarter and found the old man at home in his shop. The small dusty window of this place was full of birds and animals preserved in unrealistic poses, and above it hung a partly obliterated sign. It stood on one side of an old paved square, entry to which was gained through a narrow brick arch. Fish was being sold from a cart at one end of the square; at the other rose the dark bulk of “Our Lady of the Zincsmiths”; children ran excitedly about between the two, squabbling over a bit of pavement marked out for the hopping game “blind Michael.” As Ashlyme stepped through the arch he heard a woman’s voice, shrill, nasal, singing to a mandolin; and the air was full of the smells of cod and saffron.

The old man was watery-eyed and frail. He stood amid the clutter at the back of the shop, clutching one stiff hand with the other and smiling uncertainly. The skin was stretched over his long skull like yellow paper. He had on a faded dressing gown which had once been embroidered with fine silver wire. A few twists of this still poked out of its lapels and threadbare elbows. He took Emmet Buffo by the arm and drew him away from the door.

“Come and look!” he whispered excitedly.

In a garret near Alves he had found a metal feather. It was the first proof of his theories. Smiling and nodding, he held it out for Buffo to examine. He cast quick, anxious little glances over his shoulder at Ashlyme. Ashlyme looked away and pretended to be interested in the stuffed birds which stood on the shelves as if they were waiting to be revived. The gaze of their small bright eyes made him shift impatiently. The old man looked like a bird himself, with his thin bones and nodding skull. He is frightened I will steal his discovery, thought Ashlyme. Buffo should have come on his own.

“Hurry up, Buffo.” But Buffo was engrossed.

Ashlyme picked his way between the bales of rags and secondhand clothes which made up the shop’s stock-in-trade. He found what he thought was a nice piece of brocade, folded into a thick square and heavy with damp. When he shook it out and held it up to the light from the doorway, it turned out to be a decomposing tapestry, in which was depicted a city at night. Huge buildings and monuments stood under the moon. Along the wide avenues between them, men dressed in animal masks were stalking one another from shadow to shadow with mattocks and sharpened spades. He dropped it quickly and wiped his hands. He heard the old man say, “The clue I have been looking for.”

“What do you think, Ashlyme?” asked Buffo.

“It looks like an ordinary feather to me,” said Ashlyme, more bluntly than he had meant to. “Apart from the colour,” he amended.

“These birds are real!” said the old man defensively. He came closer to Ashlyme, holding the feather tightly. “Would you like a cup of chamomile tea?”

“I think we’d better just look at what we came to see,” said Ashlyme. Buffo and the old man bent down and began to root through a pile of disintegrating bandages. Ashlyme watched uneasily. “What are you looking in there for?” he said. “Who would wear things like that?” He walked off irritably.

“Don’t you want to choose your own disguise?” Buffo called after him in a puzzled voice.

“No,” said Ashlyme.

He stood outside in the square, watching the children run about in the chilly sunshine. Above him the partly obliterated sign creaked. If he studied it carefully he could make out the word SELLER. The fishmonger was pulling his barrow out under the archway; the woman was still singing. Ashlyme closed his eyes and tried to imagine how he would paint if he lived here rather than up in Mynned. He decided that one day he would find out. The smell of the food being cooked was making him hungry. Suddenly he realised how rude he had been to Buffo and the old man. He went back inside and found them drinking chamomile tea. “Can I have a look at that feather?” he asked.