Viriconium

If you stood at the window in the studio at Mynned and looked out towards the Low City, you felt that Time was dammed up and spreading out quietly all around you like a stagnant pond. The sky was the colour of zinc.

Ashlyme pursued his life dully, unsure what he might have begun by bringing the dwarf and the fortune-teller together. One night he dreamed he was standing in a gallery which overlooked the ground floor of a large building. The whole of this floor, he recorded, was given over to piles of secondhandclothes, among which wandered hundreds of elderly women with powdered cheeks and wet angry eyes. They turned the clothes over busily: they looked like beetles in their black coats. Then the Barley brothers had come in, accompanied by the Grand Cairo, who immediately began giving away coloured balloons. There weren’t enough to go round. The women fought over them in the aisles, running over one another furiously, red in the face. I woke up sweating: it was just like being in Hell.

The popularity of his portraits persisted, but he found his clients distracted and hard to pose. For the moment, he wrote, they are a little subdued. It will pass. They find themselves chafed by their isolation. They say it is like living on an island, and I suppose they are right.

Something new, in the shape of Paulinus Rack and his difficulties, soon came to take their mind off their predicament. I have heard, Ashlyme noted, not without satisfaction, that he has made unwise property investmentsin the Low City. If Die Traumunden Knaben is not a success, he will crash, and his patrons will disown him. Yet they constantly interfere with the production, demanding that it be made “more acceptable.” They must have sets designed by Audsley King, but they do not want the ones that have already been submitted. These are, it appears, “too gloomy”; they are “drab”; they are at one and the same time “too suggestive” and “too blatant.” Rack is driven to dining alone at the Charcuterie Vivien (where he does not speak to me). Meanwhile, somebody has suggested we have a play about the Barley brothers.

He viewed this with some distaste.

These great fools occupy our minds enough as it is. Nightly they are staggeringalong the Mynned gutters, gaping at the stars through the branches of the trees. Must we have them paraded in front of us at the Prospekt Theatre, as well, their pockets full of clinking bottles, followed onto the stage by half a dozen barking Dandy Dinmont dogs they have bought from some trader in Line Mass who claims to have trained them on Stockholm Tar and live cats?

And later he added:

The Grand Cairo seems to fear them more than ever. “Their ears are everywhere!” he claims, and has sent out orders to increase the vigilance of his own spies. He visits my studio in the early hours and sits down cross-legged in the only good chair, as full of his own importance as ever and heavy with secrets he cannot wait to divulge-the plague zone has shifted again, fifteen people will be arrested at Alves tomorrow for trying to smuggle relatives out, and so forth. But his conspiracies are not going well. He is bilious, quarrelsome, insecure. If he hears a door slam in the distance he gives a guilty start, then tries to pass it off by laughing sarcastically or flying into a rage. He drinks black-currant gin without stopping; and as this stuff inflames his imagination his conversationturns less on how he will outwit his masters, and more and more on escape from the city.

“Tell me, Ashlyme,” he sighs. “Will any of us ever get out of this trap we have made for ourselves?” He never mentions the Fat Mam.

As the dwarf’s anxieties multiplied, he abandoned his visits to Mynned. But he would not have Ashlyme at the tower in Montrouge. Instead he arranged furtive meetings in Shrogg’s Dene, Cheminor, and the Haunted Gate, all the most squalid regions of the Low City, often to no more purpose than half an hour’s walk in the rain along some old fortification overgrown with willow herb, during which he would pick up and cast aside dozens of bits of leather, rusty saucepans, and other decaying domestic implements. One evening on his return from such an outing, Ashlyme found himself on Clavescin Crescent, a street whose name was not familiar to him.

He had come from a depopulated suburb a mile north of Cheminor, where muddy cinder paths lined with poplar trees wound among the empty lazar houses and crematoria. He had hoped to be at the foot of the Gabelline Stairs before darkness caught him: but it was already late, and a heavy blue twilight had set in, confusing him as to distances. He recognised the three-storey terraced houses, with their peeling fronts and cracked casement windows, as belonging to the Artists’ Quarter. Which part of it he wasn’t entirely sure, although he hoped he might be close to the familiar warren of streets behind Monstrance Avenue and the Plaza of Unrealised Time.

Little arched alleyways led off the crescent at intervals. He was hurrying past the mouth of one of them when he heard a low cry-not quite of pain, but not quite of anguish either.

This was such a strange sound to hear, even in the plague zone, that he stopped and peered into the alley. It was damp and unwelcoming, but it opened out after ten yards or so into a courtyard like a deep well, the sides of which were propped up by huge balks of timber. Night was already advanced there amid the builders’ rubble. At the foot of one bulging wall, under a heavily boarded window, bags of mortar stood in a line. Someone had fallen down among them. Ashlyme could see an indistinct figure supporting itself on its hands and knees. Unwilling to enter the alley, he called uncertainly, “Are you unwell?”

“Yes,” said a muffled voice. Then: “No.”

Ashlyme bit his lip. “Can you move this way?” he suggested.

Silence.

“I can only help you if you come out,” said Ashlyme.

A low chuckle came from behind one of the timber balks. Ashlyme said, “Is there someone else in there?” He strained his eyes to see into the courtyard. The man on the floor put his hands on his head and groaned suddenly. “Are you alone in there?” Ashlyme asked him.

The Barley brothers, who had spent all afternoon hunting rats in the overgrown gardens behind the crescent, were unable to keep quiet any longer.

“Nobody in here, yer honour,” said Matey in a sepulchral voice. They had never heard anything funnier. They stuffed their handkerchieves into their mouths and rolled about on the floor. They bolted from the shadows which had concealed them and, laughing helplessly, shouldered their way out of the alley. “What a frightful sight!” they shouted, and, “Give him some stick, vicar!” Their grinning faces bobbed over Ashlyme in the twilight like red balloons; they smelled strongly of ferrets and bottled beer. Hard-favoured little Dandy Dinmont dogs milled about between their hobnail-booted feet, yelping hysterically.

“I’m weeing myself,” said Gog. “I’m doing it!”

Ashlyme was incensed. “Leave us alone!” he cried. “Go back where you belong and stop all this!” But they only laughed louder and ran away down the crescent, belching and farting and tripping over their dogs.

When the echo of their footsteps had died away at last, Ashlyme went to have a look at the man in the courtyard. He was trembling feverishly. Every so often he let out a groan, then whispered something to himself which sounded like, “Where am I? Oh, where am I?” He had no obvious injuries. His clothes, though crumpled and covered with whitish dust, were of good quality; he still had on a wide-brimmed felt hat of a kind popular in the High City. But he would not say who he was or where he had come from; and when Ashlyme urged him, “If you could just get up-” he only whimpered and pushed himself further in among the bags of cement. Ashlyme knelt down and tried to lift him. He resisted feebly and his hat fell off. Ashlyme found himself gazing into the flabby features and horrified eyes of Paulinus Rack.

“What on earth are you doing here, Rack?” he said.

“I’m lost,” whispered the entrepreneur helplessly. “I’m lost.”

He clutched Ashlyme’s sleeve. “Beggars are all around us,” he said. “Do nothing to provoke them.” Suddenly he shivered and hissed: “Livio, all these roads are the same! Livio, they don’t lead anywhere! Livio, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” Breathing heavily, hanging on to Ashlyme’s shoulder for support, he pulled himself to his feet and stood there with his mouth hanging open, staring about in a frightened, sightless way.

At the Luitpold Cafe they were keeping the night at arm’s length in a stuporous silence.

Madame sat behind her zinc counter with its shallow glass dishes of gooseberries soaked in lemon genever, thirty years the speciality of the house. A few vague plumes of steam issued from the kitchen door behind her. When she wasn’t required to serve she folded her thin hands in her lap and stared at nothing, like an animal waiting at a gate. Insects smacked into the wavering, bluish lamps, blundered off round the room, and flew into the lamps again. A generation before, this place had been the very heart of the Artists’ Quarter, the centre of the world: now its walls had an indelible lacquer of dirt into which had been scratched the indecipherable signatures of arriviste and poseur; and in place of the fabulous poets and painters of long ago, only a few fakers and failed polemicists sat at the marble-topped tables, writing endless letters to influential men.

Quarantine was the only word they knew. They could taste it in their mouths. They contemplated it constantly, while the plague, like grey dust, rained down on their shoulders.

Paulinus Rack had recovered his wits, although his eyes were still watery and apprehensive. It was not clear what had happened to him. He contradicted himself at every turn. First he claimed that he had entered the Low City on his own, then that he had been with Livio Fognet and some unnamed friend of theirs, “who cleared off as soon as he saw our plan.” He said that they had come in that morning at eleven o’clock, but maintained later that he remembered passing an entire night in the courtyard where Ashlyme had found him. He said that he had been opportuned by beggars, and had to hide from them, but boasted later that they had been members of the plague police in disguise, with a special warrant for his arrest.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the plague zone had frightened and disoriented him. “Trees, buildings, gutters, every street identical, Ashlyme!” he kept saying. “We soon lost all sense of direction.” And then, speaking of his ordeal of the courtyard, “You know, I could hear those two foul creatures inside the house for hours, killing things, laughing at me.” He shuddered. “The shouting and squealing! It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me!”

Ashlyme eyed him unforgivingly. “You were a fool to come in at all. What happened to Livio Fognet?”

Rack looked down at his fat hands and gave a little smile. “I know,” he sighed. “I know it was foolhardy, but that is my nature. How can I ever thank you?” He drank noisily from his glass of tea. “I feel much better now.” Of Fognet he would only say, “I stuck with him as long as possible, Ashlyme. But he kept taking his own pulse. He was certain he had caught some disease. Then we quarrelled over the direction of the High City. He hit me. He was blubbering at the end: blubbering.”

“You will always get lost in here,” said Ashlyme, who privately thought that Fognet might tell a different story. “But you must never panic. When I first started to come in I stuck to the Plaza of Unrealised Time. You get used to it in the end. Will Fognet find his own way back? Or ought I to look for him?”

Rack wiped his lips. “Isn’t that Gunter Verlac over there?” he said. He smiled insincerely across the room. “I must go and have a word with him.”

And Ashlyme could get no more from him.

At about eleven o’clock they rose to go, chilled by the emptiness and gloom. At the next table, B- de V- the poet was busy writing a letter. He raised his white, inoffensive, sheep-like head as they passed by. “We’ll never escape from here, any of us,” he said matter-of-factly, as if they had asked his opinion. Madame sat beside her counter and watched them leave, her hands in her lap, a cup of bluish chocolate cooling in front of her. Ashlyme saw Rack to the head of the Gabelline Stairs. He shook Ashlyme’s hand and trotted off eagerly towards Mynned. We shall never hear the last of it, Ashlyme wrote later, now that he has been in the plague zone. And: His only hope was to get Audsley King to redraw her designs for The Dreaming Boys. But I don’t believe she would have helped him, even if he had got as far as the Rue Serpolet.

Ashlyme’s own visits to Audsley King continued. One afternoon, at her insistence, he lit a bonfire in the small garden at the rear of the house and carried her out to watch it.

“How nice this is,” she said.

There was no wind. Within the tall brick walls-which, with their mats of bramble, bladder senna, and reddish ivy, dulled the sounds of construction coming from either side-the air was sharp and rapturous, the light a curiously bleached lemon colour. The smoke of Ashlyme’s blaze, of which he was deeply proud and which he fed energetically with dead elder branches and sprays of yellow senna, hung motionless over the house, its scent remaining sharp and autumnal even when it mixed with the smoke of the builders’ fires. Audsley King watched him affectionately, smiling a little at some recollection. But when he began to pull down living ivy she chided, “Be careful, Ashlyme, that those tangled stems do not fasten themselves round your dreams. They will have their revenge.” But it was plain that her own dreams concerned her more than his. “Let’s burn the furniture instead. I shan’t need it soon.”

He eyed her warily. He could not tell if she was teasing him. All day her mood had been changeable, demanding.

“Paint me!” she ordered suddenly. “I don’t know how you can bear to waste this light!”

It was a long, strange afternoon.

The too-large collar of Audsley King’s fur coat conspired with the bleached light to diminish and soften the mannishness of her features until she looked, as she stared into the fire, like a child staring out of a familiar window. Ashlyme, encouraged, worked steadily; she had never been so complaisant a model. Meanwhile Fat Mam Etteilla came and went, communicating a monolithic calm as she burned the household rubbish. Into the fire went old picture frames, Audsley King’s bloodied handkerchiefs, a chair with one leg missing, a cardboard box which when it burst slowly open revealed a compressed mass of papers tied with old ribbon. She watched them all reduce to ashes, her agreeable face reddened by the heat, patches of sweat appearing under her arms. She was like a great patient horse, gazing with drooping underlip across an empty field.

(Ashlyme studied her covertly. Had she seen the Grand Cairo since that curious meeting in Montrouge? He was not sure. Her thoughts were invisible.)

Later, old women came to sit out on their balconies, looking up at the sky like animals about to be drowned. Fat Mam Etteilla fetched down her cards, laid them out on an old baize-covered table, and predicted, “A good marriage, a bad end.” The workmen next door brought down a wall, more by accident than design, and the old women, chuckling appreciatively, watched the dust belly up into the air. The light shifted secretively a degree at a time, until it had left Ashlyme’s work behind. Audsley King, anyway, had evaded him again: the heat of the fire had relaxed her narrow, angular face and softened the lines about her mouth. He was reluctant to ask her to change her pose, for the comfortable crackling of the fire had induced in him a hypnotic sense of time suspended, time retrieved: so he began a new charcoal study instead. After he had been scratching away at this for a few minutes, Audsley King said, “Before I came to the city I cut off my hair. It was the first of many fatally symbolic gestures.”

She contemplated this statement as if trying to judge its completeness, while Ashlyme, intrigued, looked at her sidelong and carefully said nothing.

“It was the autumn before I married,” she went on. “The servants brought out all the rubbish which had accumulated in the house during the past year and burned it in the garden, just as we are doing here. Our parents looked on, while the children ran about cheering, or stared gravely into the red heart of the flames. We loved those autumn fires!”

She shook her head.

“How can I explain myself? I cut off my hair and threw it on the fire. Was it despair or intoxication? I was going to the city to begin a new life. I was going to be married. From now on I would paint what I saw, see everything I wished to see. Viriconium! How much it meant to me then!”

She laughed. She shrugged.

“I know what you are going to say. And yet…

“We were all going to be famous then-Ignace Retz the wood-block illustrator, elbowing his way down the Rue Montdampierre in his shabby black coat at lunchtime, Osgerby Practal, with nothing then to his name but his sudden drugged stupors and his craving for ‘all human experience’; even Paulinus Rack. Oh, you may laugh, Ashlyme, but we took Paulinus Rack quite seriously then, going about his business in a donkey cart, with that sulphurous yellow cockatoo perched on his shoulder! He was thinner. He hadn’t yet turned a whole generation of painters into tepid water-colourists and doomed consumptive aesthetes on behalf of the High City art collectors.”

She made a sad defensive gesture.

“Once when I was ill he brought me a black kitten.” She smiled. “Once,” she said, “he tried to kill himself on the banks of the Pleasure Canal. He pressed a scarf soaked in aether to his face until his legs gave way, but was pulled out of the water before he could drown. We all rather admired him for that.

“Later I understood the pointlessness of this dream, and of the people who pursued it through the smoke in the Bistro Californium, the Antwerp Estaminet. Oh, we were all going to be famous then-Kristodulos, Astrid Gerstl, ‘La Divinette.’ ” But my husband contracted a howling syphilis and hanged himself one stifling afternoon in the back parlour of a herbalist’s shop. He was twenty-three years old and had saved no money.

“I was too proud to go back to my mother. I was too determined. Your hair was not your own to cut, she had written to me. It was mine. I had cared for it since you were born. What right had you to betray such a trust? We spoke again only once before she died.”

Finally she said:

“I regret none of this. Do you understand?” and was silent again. She closed her eyes. “Will somebody build up the fire? I am cold.”

For a long time nothing happened in the garden. Afternoon crept toward evening; the fire burned down; the fortune-teller somnolently addressed her cards. Ashlyme sketched the strange long hands of Audsley King. (Later he was to use them as the basis of the equivocal sequence “Studies of some of my friends,” fifty small oils on wood which bemuse us by their repetition of a single image differentiated only by minute changes in the background light.) Occasionally he glanced at her face. Her eyes were half closed, mimicking the exhausted trance of the invalid, while from beneath the grey papery lids she judged his reaction to her little biographical fable. He had decided to hold his tongue. He would take the story away with him and hope its meaning eventually became clear.

“One July,” she said suddenly, “storms came up from Radiopolis nine days in succession, and always at the same time in the evening. We sat in the summer house, my sisters and I, watching the damp soak into the coloured wood which formed the dome of the roof.” She spoke quickly and fractiously, as if she had pulled this memory across like a screen to hide something else. “In drier weather we-”

She broke off distractedly.

“My life is like a letter torn up twenty years ago,” she said in a low, anguished voice. “I have thought about it so often that the original sense is lost.”

The unfinished portrait attracted her attention. She got unsteadily to her feet and stumbled through the edges of the fire, the hem of her coat scattering charcoal and ashes. She took the canvas off the easel and stared intently at it. “Who’s this?” she demanded. “What a travesty!” She laughed loudly and threw it in the fire. It lay there inertly in the middle of the flames, then, with a sudden dull whooshing sound, flared up white and orange. “Who is it, Ashlyme?” She whirled round and struck out at him; groaned with vertigo; fell against him, hot and fragile as a bird. He grasped her wrists. “None of it will work now,” she whispered. “How could you let me die here, Ashlyme?”

This was so unfair he could think of nothing to say. He blinked helplessly at the burning portrait.

Fat Mam Etteilla, accustomed to these brief and febrile rebellions, had got patiently to her feet: now she spread her great capable arms in an elephantine gesture of comfort and tried to sweep Audsley King up in them. Audsley King, choking and weeping, avoided her with a fish-like twist. “Go back to your damned gutter!” she said. She caught sight of the tarot pack, spread out on the fortune-teller’s table. “These cards will never save me now. They smell of candles. They smell of old lust.” She consigned them in handfuls to the flames, where they fluttered, blackened, and finally blazed like caged linnets in a house fire in the Rue Montdampierre.

“Where is the intercession you promised?” wept Audsley King. “Where is the remission you foresaw?” And she darted away across the garden to crouch coughing desperately at the base of the wall.

Four or five of the cards, though charred at the edges, had escaped worse damage. Without quite knowing why, Ashlyme pulled them out of the fire and gave them back to the fortune-teller. He watched himself doing this, rather surprised-licking his fingers, steeling himself briefly, plunging his hand into the fire before he could think about it further-and regretted the gesture almost immediately. Fat Mam Etteilla received the cards as her due, tucked them away without comment like a handkerchief in the sleeve of her grubby cotton dress. And as soon as he saw that he had burned himself, Ashlyme felt ill and resentful. Audsley King’s behaviour had caused him to act without thinking. He marched over to her.

“It was not fair to burn the portrait,” he said, “or the cards. We cannot make you immortal.”

She stared up at him until she had forced him to look away.

“You are only playing at this!” he shouted. “I thought you had rejected the poses of the High City.” He walked off angrily, waving his arms. “You must make up your mind what you really want, if you want me to help you at all.”

She coughed painfully.

“I am already dead as far as the High City is concerned,” she called after him. “Why should they have even a portrait of me? They are all up there, waiting to bid for it, just like vultures!”

He forced himself to ignore this, although he knew it was probably true. He got hold of a stick and poked about with it in the fire, trying to make out which of the tarry flakes of ash had been his canvas, which the unfortunate Fat Mam’s cards. Slowly his anger wore off and he stopped trembling. He blew on his smarting fingertips. When he was able to turn round again, he found the fortune-teller standing patiently behind him, supporting Audsley King in her arms like a tired child. She was too weak to cause them any further trouble. Silently they carried her inside. When Ashlyme looked down from the first landing, the fire had gone out and the corners of the garden had filled up with shadows. A small wind licked the embers, so that they blazed up briefly the colour of senna flowers, silhouetting his easel as it stood there like a small bony animal tethered and waiting for its owner.

Halfway up the stairs, a thin line of blood ran out of the corner of Audsley King’s mouth. Her eyes widened; brightened; dulled. “I have such bad dreams about fish,” she said drowsily. “Can’t we go up another way?”

What was Ashlyme to do?

Audsley King has changed her mind, he wrote optimistically in a note to his friend Buffo, though in fact he was far from sure that she had. “ I shall come and see you immediately.

Unsure of his reception-after all, he had not only abandoned the astronomer during the debacle in the Rue Serpolet, he had ignored him thereafter-he waited nervously for a reply. None came.

We must make new plans, he had written. And yet when it came to planning he found his brain full of contradictory considerations, or else as empty as a new canvas. Audsley King must have somewhere to live, for instance, if she is coming up here. She must have money. However distasteful it was to him, he should, he knew, go and see Paulinus Rack, with whom he could perhaps arrange such things. But the longer it took Buffo to reply to his note the less faith he had in Audsley King’s change of mind-and the longer he stayed in his studio, biting his pen, listening to the rain dripping in the attic, trying to conjure up in his mind’s eye a picture of the thin, intense provincial girl who had arrived in Viriconium twenty years ago to shock the artistic establishment of the day with the suppressed violence and frozen sexual somnambulism of her self-portraits.

During this period he saw very little of the Grand Cairo.

Messages more or less urgent still arrived at the studio, usually at night, and in them were named meeting places more or less remote. But the dwarf rarely turned up now at early evening by the Haunted Gate, or deep in the overgrown shadows of the cisPontine Quarter, where only owls now lived; so Ashlyme began to feel that he could ignore them safely. He did go to Montrouge one night-he was returning through the Haadenbosk from a dinner given by the Marchioness “L” for Mme. Chevigne, Vera Ghillera, and the cast of The Little Humpbacked Horse -hoping perhaps to rekindle the dwarf’s enthusiasm for Audsley King. But there were no lights behind the half-completed terra-cotta facades of the civic building programme. And when he reached the tower it was dark and preoccupied.

Two or three cats ran out of a trench dug across the newly surfaced road at my feet, he wrote in his journal. Their eyes were green and blank. Has the dwarf already left Viriconium? Or was he crouched up there in the darkness among his rusty knives and hair totems, trying to keep track of his plots against the Barley brothers?

He had something of an answer to this a few days later in the plague zone.

On a visit to the Rue Serpolet he was forced out of his way by the attentions of the beggars in the Plaza of Unrealised Time. He found himself on the seeping periphery of Cheminor, that suburb of flaking brick walls where the streets are lined with graveyards, old churches, and boarding-houses. At night the lamps there give off an orange glare which muddles the sense of perspective and gives the blank faces of the people a suffering look. They seem to float towards you in their cheap sober clothes, then away from you again like ghosts. It is often called “the Undertakers’ Quarter.” Ashlyme, unencumbered by his easel for once, was making his way down an alley which opened onto the main thoroughfare of Endingall Street, when he heard the sound of running footsteps.

He popped his head out of the mouth of the alley. Up and down Endingall Street the orange lamps stretched dully away. He had the impression of a crowd of people coming quickly towards him. He withdrew his head and waited.

A moment later a small agitated figure ran past. It was the Grand Cairo. He had a leather cosh in one hand, and in the other something that looked like a long kitchen knife. He passed the mouth of the alley in a flash, the skirts of his black coat slapping his knees and his steel-toe-capped boots thudding urgently as he propelled himself down the middle of the road with his head thrown back and his breath hissing between his bared teeth. There were extensive stains on his hands, made blackish by the orange light, and on the blade of his knife. His eyes were white and staring with effort. He risked a glance over his shoulder, groaned, and ran on, looking neither right nor left.

Close on his heels came a score of his own policemen, waving their arms and tugging back on the leads of their enormous dogs.

It was over in an instant: one moment Endingall Street was full of the pursuit, carried on in grim silence but for the pounding of feet, the hoarse panting and choking of the dogs; the next there was only a fading whiff of Altaean Balm to suggest that the dwarf had even been there. Had he killed someone again? Why else would he be chased by his own men? Ashlyme blinked into the orange glare. Endingall Street was bounded by a high wall, purpled with soot. Over the top of it he suddenly caught sight of an ornamental obelisk, bearing the figure of a stone bird poised for flight. It was a cemetery. Had they chased the dwarf into it? For a moment Ashlyme debated going to see. Then he walked quickly off in the direction of the Artists’ Quarter. By the time he found himself on familiar ground, the whole event had taken on the distant, unreal air of a scene in an old play, and he had almost convinced himself it was not the Grand Cairo he had seen, but some other very small man.

Later that evening he met Fat Mam Etteilla hurrying away from the Rue Serpolet in the direction of the High City. A fine rain had beaded her bare arms and greying hair; it gave her cheeks the same varnished appearance as the fruit on her hat. She clutched in her reddened hands the handles of an assortment of shopping bags which bulged with old clothes. She seemed withdrawn and thoughtful, heavy with determination. He walked along with her silently for a few minutes, glancing up every so often at her monumental body towering above him, and admiring what he had earlier described as her “implacable simplicity.”

“How is Audsley King?” he asked. “I’m off to see her now. I expect you’ll be back there soon?” When she didn’t answer he went on anxiously, “Do you think she should be left alone at this time of night?”

The fortune-teller shrugged.

“I can’t help her,” she said, staring darkly off into the rain, “if she won’t help herself. She has no faith in me or in the cards.” She made a peculiar, puzzled, hopeless gesture, lifting the shopping bags for Ashlyme to see. “She told me to pack my things,” she said. “That’s what she’s just done.” She wiped the rain off her face with a sudden angry motion. Her eyes were hard and hurt.

“She’s like a child,” protested Ashlyme. “She doesn’t mean it.”

Fat Mam Etteilla sniffed. “I’ve packed my things, as I was told to,” she said stubbornly. “You have to go where the faith is.” She shook her head. “I could have helped her,” she said. “She begged me to, as you well know.” She walked away from Ashlyme, quickly and angrily, leaving him behind as if he reminded her too much of Audsley King. “Begged me to,” she repeated, with a sort of massive dignity. “But I can’t do any more if she doesn’t respect my cards.”

Ashlyme didn’t know what to say. He struggled to keep up with her, but in her anger and hurt pride she quickly left him behind. He stood on the wet pavement feeling isolated and abandoned. “I thought I saw the Grand Cairo an hour ago,” he shouted suddenly. “He seemed to be in a hurry.” If he had hoped to surprise her he was mistaken. She walked on like a tired horse, her broad back moving steadily away towards the Plaza of Unrealised Time. Eventually she looked back at him and nodded. “I knew it was you who came dressed as a fish,” she said. “Oh, you could have helped her once, I give you your due for that. But you should have got her out of there while you still had the courage of your convictions.” Then she was gone.

He was in the Rue Serpolet for an hour and a half, whistling and calling up at the lighted window of Audsley King’s studio. A shadow moved back and forth in front of the shadow of an easel, but she would not let him in, and all he could hear was her harsh, mannish sobbing. The air was full of withered chestnut leaves, which touched his face like wet hands.

He continued to hear nothing from Emmet Buffo. Was the astronomer ignoring him out of pique? Should he go to Alves and see him anyway? He was loth somehow to make the journey. He sent another note instead.

While he wasted his energy thus, unaware that he had so little time left at his disposal, autumn, like a thin melancholy, settled itself into the plague zone. Down there it was as if the world had become as flimsy as the muslin curtains at an old woman’s window in the Via Gellia: as if the actual essence of the world was too old to care anymore about keeping up appearances. With the first frosts, unknown wasting diseases had swept the Low City; and the quarantine police, unable to deal with the situation, unsure even whether the new phthisias and fevers were contagious, had panicked and begun to seal and burn the houses of the dead. For days the dusty avenues and abandoned alleyways had been full of reluctant fires, flickering at night like blue gas flames, as feeble and debilitated as the zone itself, which now crept quietly over its original boundary at the Pleasure Canal, inundating Lime Walk and the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves and stealing up towards the ponderous great houses, the banks of anemones, the tall pastel towers of the High City. Alves held out on its steep spur, eccentric and insular in a greyish sea.

As the plague tightened its grip, so the Barley brothers tried harder to become human.

If indeed they did create the city “from a handful of dust,” Ashlyme told his journal, these brothers seem to have done so only in order to vandalise it. They contribute nothing. They get into the wineshops at night and steal from the barrels. When they go fishing in the Pleasure Canal it is only to fill a jam jar full of mud and stagger home at midnight as pissed as the newts they have been able to discern, always out of reach, in the cloudy water.

But if the Barley brothers felt from afar the warmth of Ashlyme’s disapproval, they did not show it. They continued to grin and snigger nightly in the queue outside Agden Fincher’s pie shop; they continued to hunt rats with their cudgels and Dandy Dinmont dogs among the derelict suburbs of the plague zone, taking huge hauls of these vermin from the boarded-up warehouses and empty cellars and trying to sell them for a shilling a time to astonished restauranteurs on the Margarethestrasse. Their imagination, complained Ashlyme, is vile and wayward. And as if in response to this, they invented donkey jackets, Wellington boots, and small white plastic trays covered in congealed food with which they littered the streets and gutters of Mynned.

The High City, which had recovered its heart, followed these adventures with an indulgent eye, “Besotted,” as Ashlyme expressed it one day to the Marchioness “L,” “by a vitality it admires but dare not emulate.”

The Marchioness gave him a vague, propitiatory smile.

“I’m sure we none of us begrudge them their youth,” she said. “And they do take our minds wonderfully off our present troubles!” She leaned forward. “Master Ashlyme, I fear that Paulinus Rack will have to abandon The Dreaming Boys. ” She waved her hand in the general direction of the Low City. “In the present situation we all feel very strongly that we should have something less gloomy in the theatre. Of course, it is a pity that we shall not now see Audsley King’s marvellous stage sets…” Here, she left an expectant pause, and when Ashlyme failed to respond, reminded him gently, “Master Ashlyme, we do so rely on you for our news of Audsley King.”

“Audsley King is near to death,” he answered. “She will not rest but she cannot paint. She has lost faith in her art, herself, everything. Every time I go there she has allowed herself closer to the brink.” He paced agitatedly up and down the studio. “Even now she might be saved. But I will not force her to leave that place. I find that for me to act, the decision must be hers.” He bit his lip. To his horror he found himself admitting, “Marchioness, I am in despair. Can you believe she wishes to die?”

This question seemed to take the Marchioness by surprise. She stared at him thoughtfully for some time, as if trying to assess his sincerity (or perhaps her own). Then she said meditatively:

“Did you know that Audsley King was once married to Paulinus Rack?”

Ashlyme looked at her in astonishment.

“It was a long time ago. You are certainly too young to remember. The marriage ended when Rack first made his name in the High City, with those sentimental watercolours of life in the Artists’ Quarter. He called them ‘Bohemian days.’ At the Bistro Californium and the Luitpold Cafe they never forgave him for that. He had been a leading light in their ‘new movement,’ you see. They were all supposed to be above money and that sort of thing. They held a funeral, complete with an ornate coffin, which they said was ‘the funeral of Art in Viriconium.’ Audsley King was the first to throw earth on the coffin when they buried it on Allman’s Heath. Later she claimed that her husband had died of syphilis: a symbolic punishment.”

The Marchioness thought for a moment. “Of course,” she went on, “Rack’s later behaviour rather tended to confirm their opinion of him.”

She got up to leave. Pulling on her gloves, she said, “You are very fond of her, Master Ashlyme. You must not allow her to bully you because of that.”

She paused at Ashlyme’s front door to admire the city. Sunshine and showers had filled the streets of Mynned with a slanting watercolourist’s light; a bank of cloud was advancing from the west, edged at its summit with silver and tinged beneath with the soft purplish grey of pigeon feathers. “What a delightful afternoon it is!” she exclaimed. “I shall walk.” But she lingered on the pavement as if trying to decide whether to add something to what she had already said. “Audsley King, you know, was a spoilt child. She has never made up her mind between public acclaim-which she sees, rightly or wrongly, as destructive of the true artistic impulse-and obscurity, for which she is not temperamentally fitted.”

Ashlyme said neutrally, “She doesn’t respect the judgement of the High City.”

“Just so,” said the Marchioness, looking out across the jumbled roofs of the Quarter. “I expect you are right.” She smiled sadly. “We must hope she has more faith in yours.”

When she had gone, Ashlyme sat in the studio like a stone. “Married to Paulinus Rack!” he said to himself, and, “ ‘Something less gloomy in the theatre’! Has no one told them up here that the world is coming to an end?” He got up suddenly and hurried out. The Marchioness had convinced him, as she had perhaps intended, that action was still possible.