Viriconium

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 debacle 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 Cafe, 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,

In the salons we hear nothing but what clothes they wear, what wineshop they frequent this week, how they have got pregnant some silly young brodeuse from the Piazza of Inherited Tendencies. “Will the Barley brothers dine at home tonight?” the women ask each other. “Or will they dine abroad?” They will dine, as everyone knows, like pigs, in some pie shop behind the Margarethestrasse and then fall down insensible in the gutters. “The Barley brothers have invented Egg Foo Yung!”

When he thought about the Grand Cairo, Ashlyme was filled with a kind of violent disgust which extended to himself. He dreamed about the woman with the gaping mouth and the bulging eyes as if he had been responsible for thrusting the knife into the back of her throat. Nothing like this event had ever happened in his life before; even awake, he could see it over and over again just by closing his eyes. He could also see the dwarf’s expression when he had said, “That’s that, then.” It was one of satisfaction, the ordinary satisfaction of an ordinary need, as if one had just finished breakfast. Ashlyme dreaded another meeting with him if only because the shadow of this expression would lie-as it had always done, but now visible-just under his skin, alongside his vanity or his belief that he understood the language of cats.

Nevertheless a meeting was unavoidable. Ashlyme stayed away from the tower at Montrouge, but one night after his meal at the Vivien he came back to find the front door of his house banging open in the wind and the dwarf waiting for him in the darkened studio.

The dwarf looked tired. He complained, as usual, that the Barley brothers were plotting his downfall. “I do not take them seriously yet-things have not gone that far-but soon I must.” He complained of boredom. To alleviate it, he said, he had spent all week with prostitutes in Line Mass. They had called him “my little chancellor” and “my pet cock,” but he had got no enjoyment out of it, only migraines and a dry cough. As he told Ashlyme this he was watching him carefully. He sat on a windowsill, kicking his legs. He picked up Ashlyme’s lay figure and twisted its limbs into uncomfortable, not-quite-human positions. He laughed. “Come on, Ashlyme, what’s the matter? How’s old Emmley Burwash? He always looked the feeble type to me!”

Ashlyme stared at him across the studio.

“Well, if you won’t talk, you won’t,” said the dwarf. “I can’t make you.” He poked about among Ashlyme’s things until a rough portrait of Audsley King caught his eye. “What’s happened here?”

Ashlyme often saved the money he would have spent on a new canvas by reusing an old one. In this case he had done the painting over a group portrait of the Baroness de B- and her family which had never been collected from the studio. As the wet summer advanced and the new paint began to fade, the image of the Baroness was beginning to reemerge in the form of a very old woman holding a flower, slowly absorbing and distorting the figure of Audsley King. There was something deliberate and eerie about this act of replacement. It was as if the Baroness, prohibited by her own vanity from collecting the original picture, nevertheless intended to claim the canvas. Ashlyme had followed the process with a sort of fascinated horror.

“It is some failure of the pigments,” he said. “The weather. I don’t know. It wasn’t a very successful portrait anyway.” He cleared his throat; swallowed. “It sometimes happens.”

Now that he found himself able to speak, he could wait no longer.

“How did you escape the police?” he heard himself ask anxiously. “What did you tell them? I watched from the Rue Serpolet, but you did not come down again. What happened after I went?”

The dwarf, who had been waiting for this, winked cruelly.

“In the Rue Serpolet,” he said, in a parody of an official voice, “I surprised two men in the act of smuggling a poor woman out of the quarantine zone against her will. I attempted to arrest them, but they stunned me, stabbed another unfortunate woman in a particularly horrible manner, and made their escape. I cannot describe them. They were wearing the most grotesque disguises. They were obviously very experienced criminals. Oh, don’t look so wretched, man! Can’t you take a joke?”

Ashlyme bit his lip.

“Even so,” he said. “Are you sure they believed you?”

The dwarf stared at him impatiently.

“Why shouldn’t they? I am the Grand Cairo. Everything they have, they have from me.” He laughed. “Besides, I am now in charge of this very investigation.” He gave an insolent shrug, tapped the side of his nose. “I have sworn to catch the offenders. A horrible crime like this is a matter of honour to me, you might say.”

“But the testimony of the other women!”

“Unfortunately we had to arrest some of the women. They were confused, and had somehow got hold of the idea that I had injured one of their number.”

He gripped Ashlyme’s arm suddenly.

“For your own peace of mind,” he said, in a low, urgent voice, “I advise you to forget the whole dangerous business. I intend to, which is good luck for you. And another thing, Ashlyme-” He tightened his grip until tears were forced from Ashlyme’s eyes. “Never leave me in the lurch like that again, or you’ll be the next one to feel that little skewer of mine. Enemies are all around!” Ashlyme tried to pull his arm away. Contemptuously, the dwarf watched his struggles for a moment or two, then let him go. “Remember!” He was silent after that, staring at Ashlyme as if he couldn’t really see him. Then he said in quite a different tone,

“A curious thing happened to me on my way back from Line Mass this morning. I tell you, Ashlyme, it was one of those incidents that make you think! I was walking along the canal bank in a district full of warehouses. Pink-and-brown-brick walls. The smell of old water. Rusty pulleys swinging in the wind above your head. A very old man approached me and, as we drew level, stopped to look into my face. It was an eerie look he gave me. As I stared back at him the sun came out briefly from behind a cloud. An unbearable halo seemed to flare round the edges of his yellowed skull! For a second or two it was very beautiful, this incandescent light burning round the edges of his head, dissolving away the pink brick behind him so that the whole sky seemed to open up like the white page of a book “But then the wind came up again and the sun went back in, and I saw that his face was eaten away by some disease contracted in youth. His mouth was trembling. He looked sickly and preoccupied. A vague power emanated from him, like a wind pushing me away. Ashlyme, I think the plague will have us all in the end!”

The dwarf shuddered superstitiously and was silent again. This was a side of his character he had never displayed before. At first Ashlyme suspected he had made the story up, or at least embroidered it to make it more impressive; but when he passed his heavily ringed hands over his face and turned to stare gloomily out of the window, it was quite impossible not to believe that something had genuinely disturbed him in Line Mass. He declined Ashlyme’s offer of tea, with a gesture which hinted that he could not be jollied out of his mood. He was plagued, he admitted, with nervous depressions which came and went with the weather. Undoubtedly this new melancholy was of that sort. Abruptly he said, “As a matter of fact I have thought a great deal about a woman I saw when we were in the Rue Serpolet, a big woman who tells fortunes and is said to live with Audsley King. I daresay you know of a woman like that?”

Ashlyme nodded puzzledly.

The dwarf gave him a curious smile, weak-mouthed yet conspiratorial, and drew from inside his studded leather jacket an envelope with a red wax seal as big as a carbuncle. “Just so,” he said. “I want this delivered to her.” He thought for a moment. “Tell her that I am most interested in the cards. Assure her of my regard. Build me up in her eyes. This is a romantic matter, Ashlyme, and I trust you. Take the letter to the Rue Serpolet as soon as you can.”

Ashlyme was filled with panic.

“But what about Audsley King?” he appealed. “She may have recognised my voice in the melee on that wretched staircase! How can I face her again?”

The dwarf stared at him expressionlessly, holding out the letter. Ashlyme spent a sleepless night and visited the house in the Rue Serpolet the next day, a dozen lilies waxen and heavy in the crook of his arm.

“How are you?”

“As you see me.”

The room was cold. Audsley King lay on the sofa-thin, still, dazed-looking-wrapped in a fur coat with curiously huge sleeves. She spoke reluctantly of “thieves”; her eyes moved apprehensively every time a builder’s cart went past the house. Bowls of anemones stood on every flat surface, as if she had begun to mourn herself. The flowers were purple and wine red, the colours of her disease; their necks were bent compliantly. She discussed small things: her domestic arrangements (“I am here in the studio all day now”) and her meals. “I have a sudden dislike for fish!” He studied her closely, but she was not laughing at him. “Would you go to the window and look out? We have had thieves break in, and I am very nervous.”

No, she said, she had done no new work. There, as he could see, was her easel, folded against the wall. She had drawn some cartoons, but she would not show them to him, of all people. They were not good enough. She had kept them for a day only, then torn them up. Why had he not been to see her? She would be glad to sit for him again, if that was what he wanted. Life seemed so quiet. She hadn’t to exert herself. It was not empty, but very quiet. “The fortune-teller is kind, but I miss the High City,” she said. Then again, she had so much to think about, there was barely time in the day!

He promised to call again soon. As he went out she was already staring uneasily into the corners of the room.

In the narrow hall with its broken linoleum and stacked canvases, Ashlyme found the Fat Mam bending over a bucket, her great bulk unhappy in a loose, flower-printed dress with little “muttonchop” sleeves. Washing the floor had made her breathe heavily through her open mouth, and there were broad patches of sweat beneath her arms. The hall was lighted only by a fanlight, which opened onto the communal stairs; in the brown gloom this produced she seemed monumental, immovable. But she stood up as he approached, wiping one powerful forearm across her cheek, and made way for him impassively. Steam came up from the bucket. Hardly knowing what to say, he handed her the dwarf’s envelope. She turned it over, examined the florid seal, weighed it a moment in her big rough hands as if she was not certain what to do with it.

“Would you like a glass of anisette?” she asked slowly.

“Thank you,” said Ashlyme, “but I’ll have to go.”

It was the first time they had spoken.

He watched her blunt fingers, so unaccustomed to the task, split and dampen the envelope. She saw him watching and turned away with a kind of instinctive modesty to read the single sheet of paper she had found. Her lips moved. Ashlyme, who would have given her greater privacy if he could, looked up at the wall. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a flush of bright red spread slowly up her thick neck and into her pallid cheeks with their downy hairs and faint film of perspiration. This monolithic woman, with her heavy shoulders, stuporous movements, and ox-like calm, was blushing! He tapped the side of his leg nervously and stared at the steaming bucket as hard as he could.

The sound of a builder’s cart came dully into the hall through the fanlight. He could smell food cooking down the passage in the kitchen. He had a sudden feeling of ordinariness and stability, then someone shouted in the street and it was gone. At last she folded the letter up and put it, with some effort, carefully back into its envelope. She dropped it down between her huge breasts and patted the place where it had settled.

“Your friend is a fine little man,” she said. “And very helpful.”

This was not what Ashlyme had expected. Suddenly he could see, superimposed on her face, the face of the woman the dwarf had murdered- head lolling back, mouth agape on that appalling thin knife. He felt he ought to warn her of this.

“You may find that the dwarf is subject to… enthusiasms,” he said, after some thought. “I mean that he may not be as dependable as you would like.”

He saw immediately that he had said both too much and too little. Perhaps the moment was past for him to say anything about the dwarf’s behaviour anyway: he had already condoned it by keeping quiet. The fortune-teller eyed him heavily. Then she smiled. For a second her eyes seemed to become a very pure and limpid blue. It was like a signal from the intelligence within, which had disengaged itself briefly to attend to him before returning to the eternal task of sifting sense from the random fall of some internal pack of cards. “I’m sure he is a man of great resource,” she said, “and a good man. Thank him for his invitation. But what he suggests is not yet possible.”

“I see,” said Ashlyme, who did not.

Rather than wait to see her eyes fade again, he gave her a vague nod and went out. When he looked back from the door she was down on her hands and knees by the bucket, scrubbing hard at something on the floor.

He reported this meeting to the dwarf in the tower at Montrouge.

“Good,” said the dwarf, rubbing his hands. “Excellent. Better than I expected. But we must press our advantage, eh? She must come here and see me as I am, a man who has organised his life on comfortable lines but who is willing to share it!”

He was in a high good humour. He blinked and winked with contemplative conceit and contentment. He ate a pear with relish, polished his spectacles vigorously. He had a bottle of bessen genever brought in and made Ashlyme toast what he called his “romantic success.” Once or twice his gaiety seemed a little tired: he ran his hands continually through his hair, and when he wasn’t speaking his eyes had an unfocused look. He got up without warning and threw the door open as if he hoped to catch someone listening outside. Once he said, “Half my men were themselves arrested yesterday morning, due to some administrative blunder up at Uriage and Montdore.” He gave a strained laugh. “Can you imagine that?” But generally he was pleased.

“Give these to her next,” he ordered. “What flowers are in season? Never mind. Remember, no more ‘not yet possible’! No more coyness! Come and tell me her answer.” He thought for a moment. “The next time you come we will have a sitting for my portrait.” But it was plain that he had lost interest. Ashlyme left the tower carrying a parcel which proved to contain nothing but two freshly killed young rabbits, each with a green paper ribbon tied carefully round its neck. These the fat woman refused to touch, and though the dwarf claimed later that they were a traditional wedding gift in the Mingulay peninsula, Ashlyme had his doubts.

Soon he was back and forth between them once or twice a week.

This was not an onerous duty at first; and though he was conscious that it made him look a fool to play the dwarf’s romantic proxy, it suited him well enough in that it enabled him to resume his visits to Audsley King on a regular basis. Recklessly he began using the Gabelline Stairs again to get in and out of the Low City, reasoning that while he was abroad on the dwarf’s business he would not be arrested by the dwarf’s police. He began the portrait of Audsley King all over again, watching her helplessly as every day another layer of flesh melted away, deepening the bluish hollows underneath her cheekbones. Her face was constantly refining itself, seeking the exact expression of the underlying bone structure to be found in death. She did not seem to be interested in the picture. She stared listlessly at what he had done and urged him to “seek out the forms of things.” To entertain her in the long cold hours while he was painting, he told her lies about Paulinus Rack and invented scandalous love affairs for the Marchioness “L”; Livio Fognet he bankrupted. He lied without mercy, and she was eager to believe anything.

For the first time, he sensed, her courage had faltered, and she was sustained in her determination to remain in the Low City only by her ready self-contempt, her appalling strength of will. This disappointed him obscurely where, before the kidnap attempt, it would have given him heart.

Outside the studio the Low City deteriorated daily, its meaningless commerce and periods of stunned lethargy mimicking the dull decline of Audsley King’s spirit. Shredded political posters flapped from the iron railings. Rain blew across the muddy grass. The horse chestnut flowers guttered like grey wax candles. The plague cut off first Moon Street, then Uranium Square, making peninsulas then archipelagos out of them-finally it engulfed each little island while its unsuspecting inhabitants were asleep. In the sodden churchyards and empty squares the police of the Barley brothers stood about in small groups, jeering at the police of the Grand Cairo. Poets droned from the abandoned estaminets.

Audsley King seems to observe all this from a dream, Ashlyme wrote, beginning a new page in his journal. Her expression is terrible: hungry, despairing, hopeful, all at once.

He could not release himself from a sense of guilt. A self-portrait painted at about this time, “Kneeling with raised arms,” shows him, his eyes squeezed closed, apparently crawling and groping his way about his own studio, a whitish empty space. He seems to have come up against some sort of invisible barrier, against which he is pressing one side of his face so that it is distorted and whitened into a mask of frustration and despair. (This obstacle was probably the full-length mirror he had brought with him to the city some years before, as a student. In spite of its size and weight he always took it with him when he moved from studio to studio.) The original oil of the painting has been lost, but a watercolour study shows it to have been one of his most powerful pieces. He disliked it markedly, and wrote, I have drawn a rather unpleasant thing today after seeing the Grand Cairo. It is because of the outrage he has done my freedom.

The dwarf’s relations with the Barley brothers now underwent a further deterioration. It was not made clear what plots and counterplots were involved. But Ashlyme noted: He has let himself go. His boots are dirty and he reeks of hair oil. I return home late at night to find him waiting for me. If the Barley brothers are mentioned he flies into a rage, denouncing them for their latest betrayal and shouting, “They were down in the gutters until I dragged them out!” and “What thanks have I ever got for that?” Raving like this seems to tire him out, and then he spends most of his time slumped in a chair rememberingthe good times he has had in some brothel or other on the Rue des Horlogers.

Beneath his obliquity and his vile temper he is a child. Though they have done him no harm as far as I can see, he goes in such hatred of his masters that he has even made up a sort of embroidered mythological slander to account for them. The details of the myth vary from day to day, but its basis is always much the same.

The Barley brothers, he claims, are all that remain of a race of magicians or demiurges driven out of Viriconium hundreds or thousands of years ago in a war with “giant beetles.” Finding themselves exiled in the inhospitable sumps and deserts to the north, these creatures first built cities of stone cubes “with gaps between them through which the wind rumbles,” then set about projecting themselves backwards in time to a remoter, happier period of the world. By now most of them have achieved this aim, and their cities are derelict, inhabited only by mirages, simulacra, or ordinary human beings trying to mimic their culture. The Barley brothers were left behind as a punishment for some moral flaw in their natures, and in their attempts to follow where they are not wanted they have somehow become stuck in our city.

This story shows the complexity and force of the dwarf’s feelings. All he has he owes to the Barleys, though he wishes he did not. When he tells it his eyes are glazed and inturned, as if the events were still there in front of him but can only be discerned by a great effort. He makes broad yet hesitant gestures. He is very clever at details, especially architectural ones, and he dwells with considerableingenuity on the sin of the Barley brothers which has kept them from following their peers into the past. If he did not fully believe his own tale to beginwith, he has now left himself no choice.

One night the dwarf spoke of a city built by this race in the North (or perhaps in the sky, although he did not explain how this was possible):

“The people in their black overcoats seemed to drift along a few inches above the pavements. Now and then the wind pulled shadows over them so that the scene trembled like water. Their faces were white with conspiracy. Their eyes were wide open, passive; they had abandoned themselves to the wind between the blocks which pushed them gently along. Now and then there was a laugh, quickly stifled. We had them weighed up. Each one would do anything for you if he believed he had been let into some secret unknown to the rest. In the evenings a new wind howled and screamed in off the waste, bringing with it enormous lizards and insects. Handfuls of ash and ice were thrown down the streets like glass marbles. On Sundays the wet streets were carpeted with dead locusts. The Barley brothers have invented many towns, but this was the worst. I found them in the gutters there, and they soon dragged me down with them!”

He was silent for five minutes. Then he asked to see the knife he had given Ashlyme before the kidnap attempt. He always asked to see it: perhaps it was in his eyes the reaffirmation of a bond.

“I got that knife up there in the North,” he said, “and I had to do some quick work to keep it. Quick work! Do you know what we mean when we say that? Quick work is when you have to move your feet or go to the wall!” And he danced round the studio, showing his stained teeth and making clumsy passes with the knife until he was out of breath. “Oh, yes, there was blood on this knife from the moment I had it. I’ve lived in some queer spots, I can tell you. That knife and I have been in some queer spots!” His eyes took on a distant, romantic look, and he rubbed his thumb up and down the curiously flawed blade before handing it back.

“That knife will serve you well one day,” he said portentously. “I can tell you that.”

Ashlyme was impressed by his powers of invention. In the end, though, he recorded, I listen without believing. He tires, mumbles, allows his head to fall on his chest, snores. Suddenly he wakes up with a start and goes home biting his nails, afraid that he has contracted a syphilis in the Rue des Horlogers, and forgets everything he has said. By tomorrow he will have invented somethingelse to place the Barleys in a bad light.

Each night before leaving he gave Ashlyme some new gift for the fortune-teller. He would not hear of abandoning his suit. The longer she resisted him, the more inappropriate his presents became: a hank of hair, signet rings with obscene designs, a rusty flint picked up in some desert long ago. She accepted them expressionlessly, repeating, “What your friend suggests is not yet possible. My responsibilities are here.” He lost his temper with Ashlyme. He had reason to believe, he said, that his expensive flowers had been given to Audsley King instead of Fat Mam Etteilla; some of his gifts had been found in a dustbin; his letters were not being delivered. He brushed aside all Ashlyme’s explanations. “Bring her to me or it’ll be the worse for you,” he said.

Unnerved, Ashlyme put this to the Fat Mam the next time he was in the Rue Serpolet. She looked at him sharply, then said,

“Very well.”

That morning, Audsley King had suffered a small haemorrhage and was resting with open mouth and bluish lips on the studio fauteuil, turning over restively now and again to murmur in some language Ashlyme didn’t know. So as not to wake her, they were standing in the passage just the other side of the curtain, talking in low voices.

Ashlyme was surprised. “Do you mean to go and see him in his own house?”

“Yes,” said the fortune-teller. “Why not?” Suddenly she blushed, and smoothed her hair with one big, chapped hand. “A strong man will always have his own way in the end,” she said complacently.

Ashlyme stared at her.

The meeting took place one evening a week later, in the dwarf’s salle.

He had worked feverishly to prepare it for the occasion. All week, the teams of carpenters and interior decorators had gone to and fro, working to his precise instructions.

The floor had been stained black and polished. His collection of paintings had been taken down carefully and stored. The walls were covered with white linen dustcloth up to a height of about twenty feet. This had been stretched tight and pinned to make a background for a profusion of objects made from straw, hair, and metal, and also many tools such as pliers, hammers, pincers, and chisels, which hung from coppered nails or braided silk cords or specially made brackets of the dwarf’s own devising. There were old sheaves of corn, full of dust and shrivelled mice; samplers woven out of the hair of girls; two or three mantraps black with rust; and a monkey made of twisted jute fibres on a soft wire armature. All these things had been decked with loose spirals of yellow and green ribbon. A greyish light fell on them. Above them lurked the smoky umber void of the original room, a space the colour of time and decay.

The furniture had been dressed similarly. Draped with white cloth, wound about with coloured ribbon, the armchairs, armoires, and cupboards took on the air of huge, vaguely threatening parcels.

It wasn’t clear how many people the dwarf was expecting. A long trestle table in the centre of the room was loaded with food, mostly game birds still in their feathers, glazed pies, custards, and large joints of meat decorated with paper frills. Crudely plaited “corn dollies,” such as a child may make from raffia or straw on a wet afternoon in the midland levels, had been placed among the baskets of fruit, the bottles of genever, and the thick white plates. In the middle of the table was a full-sized sheep’s head, stripped and varnished, with oranges for eyes. On each side of this stood a vase of late hawthorn blossom, filling the room with the thick, soporific scent of the may.

Fat Mam Etteilla eyed these preparations nervously. She had given nothing away as she swept through the Haadenbosk, looking neither right nor left. But the queer environs of Montrouge had puzzled her, and the attentions of the dwarf’s police, though friendly, had weakened her resolve. She stared up into the vault of the old room and toyed with the floral trimmings of her hat. She is already wishing she hadn’t come, thought Ashlyme, and in an effort to make her feel more at home he said cheerfully,

“Well, he’s put on quite a show for you. Look at all this food! Do you think anyone would mind if I had one of these plums?”

When the dwarf arrived he took Ashlyme aside and said in a low voice, “I’ve dreamed the name of a street two nights in succession, Ashlyme. A street in the North.” He slopped some genever into a glass and drank it off. “What do you think of that? It’s made me damnably nervous, I don’t mind telling you.”

He noticed the fortune-teller. Immediately he was all charm. “My dear woman!” he cried, smiling up at her with all his blackened teeth. “Are you well? Are you fully recovered from those appalling events in the Rue Serpolet?” He looked slyly over his shoulder at Ashlyme, who turned away and pretended to be interested in something else. “You must tell us as soon as you feel in the slightest bit tired!” The fat woman, holding her hat with both hands in front of her, blushed modestly at the shiny floor and allowed herself to be ushered past the curious collection on the walls.

The Grand Cairo lost no chance to impress her. He turned this way and that to display his best profile. He stood with his spine arched and his chest thrust out and his hands tucked into the small of his back, looking up at her sideways to judge the effect he was having. He had dressed for the occasion in green velvet trousers tied up below the knee with red string, boots whose polished steel toecaps gave back a curved, bemusing reflection of the room at large, and a collarless shirt over which he wore unfastened a shiny black waistcoat. Round his neck he had a bit of green rag; and his hair had been slicked down with repeated applications of Altaean Balm, the powerful smell of which filled the room and mingled oddly with the scent of the may.

They made a strange pair, shuffling from exhibit to exhibit in the grey light. When he had shown her all his pieces of bone, his hair dolls, and blunt iron sickles twined with ribbon like convolvulus, he explained the meaning of each object and also where he had got it. This he had won at cards; that he had dug up in a desert; no value could be put on that one. He spoke coaxingly. “You can have any of these things. They are all very lucky.” But she was nervous and looked away. The Grand Cairo would not be downcast. He winked at Ashlyme with the vulgar gallantry of the secret policeman, as if to say, “I’m not finished by a long way yet!”

On a table he had a machine in a box. When he did something to it with his hands it produced a thin complaining music like the sound of a clarinet in the distance on a windy night, to which he tapped his feet and nodded his big head energetically, while he grinned round the room. But this only further confused the fortune-teller, and as soon as he saw that she would not dance, he shrugged and made haste to silence it. “We had a lot of those in the North,” he said.

“Look at this,” he invited her. “You can have this.” He stuck out his hand and made her look at the ring he had on it. “Inside here,” he boasted, “I carry the most deadly poison there is, made from the excrement of cats. I always wear this ring, even while I am asleep. And if it ever happened that I found myself in a position intolerable to my pride…”

He unscrewed the bezel of the ring. The fortune-teller stared expressionlessly down at the dull powder it contained.

“You can have that,” he said, snapping it shut.

She shook her head slowly in her bovine way. He smiled and looked directly into her eyes.

“Tell me my future, then,” he ordered.

The night was coming on. Fat Mam Etteilla sat resting her bosoms comfortably on the edge of the little green baize table, two dark patches of sweat spreading slowly under the arms of her dress. She shuffled the cards, spread them, and stared at them in surprise. The dwarf, looking over her shoulder, laughed loudly. He lit a lamp and sat down opposite her. “That’s something, eh?” he said. “What do you think of that?” Dull gold light flared off the grubby, colourful slips of pasteboard. He tilted his head to one side and considered them intently.

“Again!” he ordered. The fat woman went on staring at him. “Again!”

Ashlyme sat forgotten in a corner of the room. He had asked if he might go home, but the dwarf would not let him. “I might want you to take a message for me,” he said carelessly. The hot food cooled; the sheep’s head gazed into the gathering gloom with its bulging eyes; downstairs the dwarf’s police came and went, came and went, with their urgent reports from the Artists’ Quarter, their rumours from Cheminor, and their suspects from the Pont de Nile. None of this was interesting to the fortune-teller and her client. Only their two heads were visible, leaning avidly over the cards in the gold wash of light. Sometimes they set up a dull murmur: “Two rivers-a message!” “Avoid a meeting!” The room grew chilly. Ashlyme wrapped himself in his cloak and slept uncomfortably.

Later there was a quarrel; or perhaps he dreamed it. Someone knocked the table over in the dark. A stool scraped on the floor. A bottle fell and broke. Ashlyme heard the Fat Mam breathing heavily through her mouth, then the words,

“I am committed in the Rue Serpolet! What you ask is not yet possible!”

He had a confused impression of the cards spilling through the cold air the way a conjuror spills them from hand to hand, each small crude picture bright and cruel and alive and very far away.

When he next woke it was early dawn. If the table had been knocked over, they had righted it again and now sat with their elbows on it, looking first at the cards and then into one another’s eyes. The dwarf had disarranged his hair; it stood up in spikes, and beneath it his face was eroded and unhealthy. A half-eaten meal and a jug of “housemaid’s coffee” stood at the Fat Mam’s elbow, and there was dried milk in the hairs on her upper lip.

They seemed to be talking a language Ashlyme didn’t understand. He shook his head, cleared his throat, hoping they would notice him and become less remote. Fat Mam Etteilla gazed at him blankly for a second, an expression of greed fading from her features. The Grand Cairo got up and stretched. He walked over and pulled one of the oranges out of the sheep’s head, then went into the other room, peeling it. Ashlyme heard a muffled oulouloulou through the wall. A moment later the cats began to come in from Montrouge. They surrounded the card table, rubbing their heads against the fortune-teller’s ankles, more and more of them until the room was full of their drugged purr.

“None of these cats is mine,” the dwarf told her proudly, finishing his orange. “They come to me from all over the city because I speak their language. What do you think of that?”

She smoothed her hair complacently.

“Very nice,” she said.

Ashlyme left them and walked stiffly out into the city, where the thin milky light of dawn was falling across the earthworks and onto the faces of the dwarf’s raw new buildings. When he looked back the tower was dark but for a single yellow window, against which he could make out two silhouetted figures. He rubbed his eyes.