A Storm of Wings

EPILOGUE

Viriconium.

Its achingly formal gardens and curious geometries, its streets that reek of squashed fruit and fish; its (lowers like purple wounds on the lawns of the 'Hermitage'at TroisVertes; its palace like a shell: how can one deal with it in words?

Viriconium.

If you go and stand up in the foothills of Monar you can see it hanging below you wrapped in a mantle of millenial calm. From the brow of Hollin Low Moor you may watch it fade into another night. Its histories make of the very air about it an amber, an entrapment. Light flares from the vivid tiered heights of Minnet-Saba, from the riverine curve of the Proton Circuit, the improbable towers and plazas of the Atteline Quarter; under a setting sun banks of anemones and sol d'or planted about the graves of tegeus-Cromis and Tomb the Dwarf glow like triumphal stained glass; and someone far off in the still twilight is reading aloud a verse of Ansel Verdigris, the poet of the City.

Viriconium.

Spring. Down in the Cispontine Quarter the vegetation has begun to flourish again. The fuel-gathering women are no longer seen. Ragwort clothes all the fallen walls and earthy scars, its stems already infested with black and yellow caterpillars (later in the year these become an attractive crimson moth which was once the symbol of the City). Up at Alves, jackdaws are squabbling all day over nesting sites in the cracked dome of the observatory. And in that demimonde which has its centre at the Plaza of Unrealized Time, the women smile down from their casement windows, lifting a hand to pat newly-washed hair. Humanity has recolon ized the inconceivable avenues of the High City – gaping up open-mouthed at the inexplicable architecture of the Afternoon Cultures while it empties its bladder in their millennial gutters – and hung out its washing again in the Low. The 'Winter of the Locust'is over. Only a sudden increase in the number of beggars (some of whom have the most novel deformities) along the Rivelin Way persuades us that it ever took place, that we ever listened to that white thin song.

We hear that Lord Mooncarrot is seen about with Chorica nam VeIl Ban, that cold fish. He has received her mother at his house in Minnet-Saba: rumour is rife. We hear that the feverish Madame 'L'has ceased her visits to the Boulevard Aussman, is cured of all but her bad taste, and this week reopens her salon. We hear that Paulinus Rack, the fat poetaster and undertaker's agent has come by a packet of manuscript in not-unquestionable circumstances, and plans soon to edit a volume of the cockatoo's work. He can be seen any day, with his fat hands and jade cane, drinking lemon gin at the Bistro Californium. (He has theory of the Locust Winter and its madness. Who does not? Invite him to dinner and he will spill it on his waistcoat with the custard.) As for the rest of the Low City: the younger poets favour a Bistro gnosticism – the World, they say, has already ended, and we are living out hours for which no chronology allows. They cut atrocious figures as they swagger about the Artists'Quarter practising their polemic. And these days so many poseurs are wearing the meal-coloured cloak that the bravos have taken in defence to yellow velvet.

In short, the Eternal City stands as it once did, infuriating, beautiful, vulgar by turns. Only the Reborn are missing. You do not see them now in the Atteline Quarter, or on the Proton Circuit hurrying from the palace on an errand of Alstath Fuithor's. (He has never returned. The Low City always knew something like this would happen. It taps the side of its nose: sniffs.) After the persecutions they endured at the hands of the Sign, the majority of them will never come here again. They will live now in the deserts for many generations, their germ-plasm becoming as alien as that of the big lizards of the Great Brown Waste, refining their theory of Time, redefining their heritage, growing mad and strange.

In the evenings Queen Jane, Methvet Nian of Viriconium, sits in the side chamber or salle she uses as a library and drawing room, sometimes meditating this loss, which is one of many in her life. 'A world trying to remember itself:'surrounded by her sheets of music and delicate little corals, she has the wry but supple calm ofan ageing danseuse; keeps in a rosewood chest with copper reinforcing bands a gourd-shaped musical instrument from the deep East; hears the past in every passing footstep, and wonders often what became of the sword and the mail and the assassin she gave them to.

'I had hoped for so much from the Reborn,'she confides to her new advisor, the old man who is so very rarely seen in public. 'We might have rebuilt our culture. Yet they were perhaps too concerned with their own salvation to teach us… And we always too uncomplicated for their delicate nerves…'

She closes her eyes.

'They enriched us even so. Can you still see them, Cellur, when Tomb woke them first? What a pageant they made, there in the brain chamber at Knarr, with all their strange weapons!'

He can see nothing. He was not there. But he has forgotten even that (or perhaps he realizes that she has) and with a small diffident movement of his hands says, 'I am sure I do, my lady;'then, remembering something else, smiles suddenly. 'Did I not live then in a tower by the sea?'

Ten thousand grey wings beat down the salty wind, like a storm in his head!