Viriconium (53 page)

Buffo laughed. “Yours isn’t half so striking. Here!”

Ashlyme accepted it with distaste. It was damp and sweaty. He forced it quickly down over his face, so as not to give himself time to think, and was at once unable to breathe. Nauseated by its smell, his nose squashed over to one side, his left eye covered, he struggled to tear it off, found the astronomer’s hands forcing it back on. “I need no help! Leave me alone!” He was disgusted with himself as much as with Buffo. This foetid confinement, more than anything else, made the plan unbearable. His eyes were streaming. When he could see again he glared resentfully at Buffo’s swathed, stick-like limbs.

“I won’t be bandaged up like that, whatever you say!”

Buffo shrugged.

“Suit yourself, then.”

The lower stairs of the house were bathed in a dim yellow light and strewn with the lath and plaster dislodged daily by the landlord’s workmen. Abandoned building materials lay about on each landing. Ashlyme and the astronomer picked their way down through this litter, Audsley King slung between them like a stolen carpet. (While behind their doors the other occupants of the house ignored the furtive thudding on the stairs and spoke in the desultory, argumentative tones of the plague zone, asking one another if it meant to rain, and what they would get from the butcher tomorrow.)

Audsley King shook her head restively and groaned. “I cannot have those great lilies in here,” she said in a low, reasonable voice. “You know how hard it is to get my breath.” She trembled once or twice and was still.

Ashlyme and Buffo redoubled their efforts. She seemed to have grown heavier with every step, numbing their arms and slipping out of their aching fingers. They weren’t used to the work and bickered over it like two old men: if Buffo was not pulling forward too hard, then Ashlyme was hanging back. Neither dared raise his voice to the other, but, trammeled in his rancid helmet, could only curse the thick hiss of his own breath in his ears and wish himself back in the High City. Their feet scraped and slithered on the stairs.

“Don’t pull!”

“If only you would stop pushing like that!”

Without warning, Audsley King—dreaming perhaps—drew her knees up to her chin, and the sheet contracted like a ghostly chrysalis in the gloom. Ashlyme lost his grip on her shoulders. She slipped forward, knocked Buffo off his feet, and tumbled down the stairs after him, bumping and groaning on every step, to fetch up with a hollow thud among the bags of sand and lime on a landing not far below.

“Buffo!” begged Ashlyme. “Be more careful!”

Buffo stared at him with hatred, his absurd barrel chest heaving beneath its rags. The sheet writhed briefly; snores came from it. They approached it cautiously.

“Where am I?” said Audsley King.

She had regained consciousness, and obviously believed herself to be alone.

“Am I in Hell? Oh, nothing will ever console me for the ghastliness of this condition!”

It was the voice of someone who wakes in a bare room in an unknown city; stares dully at the washstand and the disordered bed; and having pulled open every empty drawer turns at last to the window and the empty streets below, only to discover she has lived here all her life.

“Another haemorrhage. If only I could die.”

She considered this, then forgot it.

“My father said, ‘Why draw this filth?’ ” she went on. “ ‘If you abuse your talents you will lose them. They will be taken from you if you draw filth.’ It’s so dark in here. I didn’t want to go to bed so soon.”

There was a small sob. She struggled a little, as if to test the limits of her confinement.

She stiffened.

A piercing shriek issued from the sheet.

Ashlyme tried to get hold of her feet but she tore herself out of his grasp and began to roll back and forth across the landing, knocking into the walls and shouting, “I am not dead! I am not dead!”

At this, doors flew open up and down the stairs and out came her neighbours to complain about the noise. A few ducked back when they saw what was happening, but several of them, mainly women, exchanged ironical if puzzled nods and settled down to watch. Emmet Buffo, who had rehearsed such an eventuality, explained to anyone who would listen: “Official business. Quarantine police. Keep back!” This was so manifestly ridiculous that he was ignored (although in the mêlée that was to develop later it did him more harm than good).

Audsley King, meanwhile, had ripped the sheet open along Ashlyme’s rough seam and thrust one of her long powerful hands through the gap to clutch desperately at the air. By now she was so frightened that she had started to cough again, in a series of deep, destructive spasms between which she could only retch and gasp. A red bloom appeared at the upper end of the sheet and spread rapidly. Ashlyme lifted her into a sitting position. “Please be calm,” he begged. The convulsion decreased a little. He was ready to confess the whole sordid business to her, but he did not know where to begin. Gently he freed her head and arms from the sheet. The women crowded forward, silent, uncertain, no longer amused; they groaned angrily at the sight of her white cheeks and bloody lips. She blinked up at them. Her hands were hot; she took one of Ashlyme’s between them.

“I beg of you, whoever you are, to get me out of this shroud,” she said.

Suddenly she caught sight of the thing over his head. She began to scream again, flailing her arms and begging him not to hurt her.

This was too much for the women, who advanced on Ashlyme, jeering and rolling up their sleeves. Emmet Buffo stepped in front of them, making gestures he imagined to be placatory. He took several nasty knocks about the head and chest, and was pushed into a pile of sand, where he lay jerking his long legs ineffectually and repeating, “Official police, official police.”

Audsley King thrust Ashlyme away. “Fish into man: man into fish!” she cried, in a thick Soubridge accent—remembering perhaps some solstitial bonfire, some girlhood ritual in the heavy ploughland. “Murderer!”

Ashlyme fell back, astonished.

A fish?

He touched the mask with his fingers. It was the head of a trout, to which someone had added thick rubbery lips and a ludicrous crest of spines. He clapped his hands to his head and, reeling about in disgust, tried vainly to pull the mask off. Its smell grew horrifying. Why had he conspired to make himself so absurd? He could think only of escaping. Audsley King would have to be abandoned. In the High City he would be a laughingstock. He threw himself at the women, who were punching and kicking Buffo with a kind of dazed, preoccupied savagery, and tried to drag the astronomer away from them.

“Bitten off more than you can chew, eh?” they sneered. “Let’s have them headpieces off and see who you really are!”

Having won the day, though, they made no attempt to carry out this threat. One of them attended to Audsley King, while the rest stood arms akimbo, sniffing defiantly, or tugged nervous fingers through their ruffled hair.

So it would have remained but for the arrival of the Grand Cairo, who had grown bored with his post at the handcart. He ran lightly up the stairs from the street and approached the women with a brisk tread, as if he was used to taking command of any situation. He was wearing a suit of military-looking brown leather, into the belt of which he had stuck a curious weapon—a knife about a foot long, with a round, varnished wooden handle like an awl’s, and a blade nowhere thicker than a knitting needle. From a strap on his wrist dangled a workman-like rubber cosh. His feet were shod in laced boots with steel toecaps. He was well aware of the effect his appearance made. With his hands clasped behind his back and his chest thrown out, he gave the women a long intent look.

“What’s this?” he asked. “Are we having some trouble with these people?”

“No,” said Ashlyme. “It’s all right.”

Hearing this, the women laughed sarcastically. They returned the dwarf’s scrutiny with bold, interested glances.

Meanwhile Emmet Buffo sat helplessly in a corner, breathing in exhausted gasps, while one of the women bent over him trying to pull off his mask. “Stop that,” ordered the dwarf. He swaggered over to her and prodded her buttocks with his truncheon. Her face reddened. “Why, you dirty little bugger,” she said, half-amused. She ruffled his hair, wrinkling her nose at the smell of Altaean Balm; then, quick as lightning, knocked him over with a jerk of her elbow. She watched him rolling about on the floor clutching his eye and said, “You’ll not do that again in a hurry, will you, my dear?”

“Obscene bitch!” shouted the Grand Cairo.

He sprang to his feet with the unpredictable violence of the acrobat (who moves from rest to motion without any apparent intervening state), dragging the long knife from his belt. Before anyone could stop him he had grabbed her by the hair, pulled her down into a kneeling position, and rammed the knife twice into her open mouth as hard as he could. Her eyes bulged briefly. “That’s that, then,” he said. Ashlyme fell down and vomited into the fish’s-head mask; around him he could hear the rest of the women screaming in panic. Emmet Buffo sat where he was, whispering, “Official police.” The dwarf danced about the landing, stabbing at any women who came within reach, until he drove the knife three inches into a doorpost and broke it off. He swung his cosh on its leather thong.

“No more!” shouted Ashlyme. “Why are you doing this?”

Weeping with fear and revulsion, he ran down the stairs and into the street, where rain had begun to pour from the undersides of the clouds, spattering the dusty chestnut trees and making a greasy cement out of the plaster dust and fallen leaves on the pavements. Buffo staggered out after him, confused and bleeding, his rags coming unwrapped and his dreadful headdress knocked askew. Seeing that they were not pursued, they leaned against the handcart. “Those wretched women,” panted the astronomer. “They will always ruin your plans.”

Ashlyme stared at him speechlessly for a moment, then walked off.

The rain fell.

Buffo called, “What about the handcart? Ashlyme?”

The screams and shouts which continued to come from the house soon drew the attention of the plague police. Buffo saw them in the distance. He gave a start of surprise, grabbed the handles of the cart, and ran erratically down the Rue Serpolet with it until one of its wheels came off. It mounted the kerb and fell onto its side. Buffo looked round in panic, as if he had lost his bearings, then made off with long strides into the gathering darkness between two buildings, calling, “Ashlyme? Ashlyme?”

The plague police went up into the house, two at a time. Shortly afterwards there was silence. Fat Mam Etteilla the fortune-teller then trudged into sight from the direction of the market. The rain had plastered her yellow cotton dress to her billowing breasts and hams. Her eyes were phlegmatic, her arms full of greengrocery. She entered the house. A great wail went up as she discovered Audsley King on the stairs. Doors were banged, the lights came on in Audsley King’s studio, there was a great deal of coming and going between floors.

Ashlyme, who had been hiding from Buffo in a wet doorway, waited until the commotion had died down and then went home, soaked.

Later, he stared into the mirror above his washstand, hardly seeing the lugubrious, blubbery-lipped totem that stared back out at him, its eyes popping solemnly and its loose scales dropping into the sink. All the way back he had dreaded trying to remove it, but it came off quite easily in the end.

THE THIRD CARD

THE CITY

You will mix with important people without artistic appreciation. Their tastes differ widely from yours. Beware “the Small Man” coming after this card.

“Angels, it is said, often do not know whether they walk among the living or the
dead.”

RAINER MARIA RILKE,
Elegies

The period that followed was quiet and nerve-racking. He woke guiltily from every sleep. In the middle of stretching a canvas or doing his house-work he would recall some incident of the débâcle and be overwhelmed by a wave of revulsion and shame. He could not turn his clients away when they came to pose, yet dreaded every knock on the door in case it was the quarantine police or—worse still—some message full of contempt from Audsley King, delivered by the avenging fortune-teller. But no summons came from either quarter.

I hear nothing from Emmet Buffo,
he wrote in his diary. And went on, perhaps unfairly,
Why should I seek him out? The whole farrago was his fault.
He reminded himself in the same breath,
I must avoid Rack and his clique.
How can I face them now, with their sneers and insinuations?

In fact he had no difficulty. Ironically enough his encounter with them on the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves had only served to increase his standing in the High City. Rumours of the failed rescue attempt—which, when they filtered up to Mynned from the exiles in the Bistro Californium and the Luitpold Café, were mercifully vague—merely added to his new romantic stature. He was popular in the salons. The Marchioness “L” called on him, with a new novelist. He was forced for the first time in his career to turn away commissions. The two or three portraits he completed at this time tended to be kinder than usual. This embarrassed him, and rather disappointed his clients. For once no one wanted an Ashlyme they could live with. They craved his bad opinion. He was their conscience. Not that he could compete with the plague, or the Barley brothers: and of the latter he was soon writing,