Viriconium

Afternoon was slipping away into evening as he made his way up the long hill to Alves. He saw immediately that there was something wrong. A strange flat light hung round the old towers, so that he seemed to be looking at them through dirty glass; the cries of the jackdaws as they wheeled round the dome of the derelict palace had a remote and uninflected note, as if they came from much further away; the peeling middle-class villas on the slopes below had aged since his last visit, and their overgrown gardens were full of household rubbish and decaying bricks. A dog trotted aimlessly about in the road ahead of him, sniffing the dust as it whirled round in cold circles. The hill seemed endless. Halfway up it he broke into a run. He could not have explained why.

Emmet Buffo’s door was open and the damp had blown into his rooms. A stale smell came from the alcove where he did his cooking. He lay under a cheap coloured blanket in the low iron bed by the washstand. He was dead. On the floor beside him were scattered the remains of two or three meals and-as if he had dropped them and never found the strength to pick them up again-a few small ground-glass lenses of different colours. Beneath the blanket his body had assumed an awkward posture, twisted partly on its side: it was as if it had contracted unevenly after death, curling up like an insect. One thin arm was bent behind his head, while the other hung over the side of the bed, its long, clumsily knuckled hand touching the floor. Perhaps he had been trying to turn over. He looked old. He looked, with his intelligent, tired eyes, his worn, unshaven face, and big raw ears, as defenceless, honest, and undemanding as he had ever done.

On a table by the bed were some sheets of paper which he had covered with numbered notes in a spiky, erratic hand. Though the notes were unrelated, the numbers gave them a mad air of continuity, as if they were intended as steps in a logical argument. No one has come to visit me in my illness, read one. Hindering the scientist is a crime, it is murdering knowledgein the bud! claimed another. Why have I never received sufficient finance? he asked himself, and answered: Because I have never convinced them of the significance of the stars, among which mankind once flew.

How long had he lain there, writing when he could, staring at the mouldy shapes on the wall when fatigue overcame him and sleep evaded him, unable to prevent himself from speculating, formulating, rationalising? I must always remember that Art is as important as Science, and containmy impatience!

Poor Emmet Buffo!-The world had puzzled him by its indifference, but he blamed no one.

Strewn haphazardly round the room were the curious flannel bandages in which he had swaddled himself for the “rescue” of Audsley King. Ashlyme stared dumbly at them. In his mind’s eye he could see Buffo quite clearly: arguing with the women on the dusty staircase; pushing the empty handcart in erratic spurts along the Rue Serpolet in the rain; hopping from one foot to the other in the deserted observatory as he fought to free himself from the stinking confinement of the horse’s-head mask. How long had he waited for Ashlyme to come and reassure him he was safe?

The observatory was in disorder. The roof lights had been left open to admit a wet, chilly air, which had stripped from the walls the last of Buffo’s charts. Some crisis in his illness had prompted him to stagger in here and collapse among his telescopes: or perhaps he had simply destroyed them out of despair. Bent brass tubing littered the floor, and when he went over to examine it, Ashlyme felt the little lenses crush beneath his feet like sugared anemones. He rubbed the condensation from a pane of glass and looked out over the Low City. He could see nothing. He could feel nothing. Night was approaching. The ramshackle greenhouse seemed to rush through the twilight like a ship. He had an overwhelming sense of disaster. He knew that if he admired Audsley King, then he had loved Emmet Buffo.

He bent to the eyepiece of one of the broken telescopes.

For a second he thought he could see a vast white plain, arranged geometrically, on which were hundreds of stone catafalques, stretching away to a curved horizon. An implacable light slanted down on them, but it began to fade before he had understood the scene before him.

He heard a sound in the other room.

When he went to see what it was he found that a detachment of the quarantine police had arrived. They filled the place up. Black uniforms, blue-tinted spectacles, and huge dogs on leads gave them an air of bravado and efficiency. But behind the spectacles their eyes were harassed and nervous, and after a hurried examination of Buffo’s corpse two of them began pouring oil on the bedclothes, the woodwork, and the walls above the bed. Two more pushed past Ashlyme into the observatory and set about smashing windows to create a good through draught. The rest stood about, chuckling over Buffo’s underwear, riffling through his papers, and dragging the dogs off the stale food in the alcove. Despite all this they were not unkind men, and they were surprised to find Ashlyme in the house.

“What are you doing?” he demanded. “Leave those things alone! Who sent you here?”

They took him quietly aside. In cases like this, they explained, cremation was the rule: although they didn’t, personally, enjoy the work. “Your father died three days ago, we don’t know what of,” they said. They had only just got round to him, due to pressure of work. “It’s so difficult now to get places to burn properly.” Recently an old woman in Henrietta Street had taken three attempts; a baker’s family at the lower end of the Margarethestrasse, five: all this was very time-consuming. “These rooms should have been sealed until we arrived.” They didn’t know how Ashlyme had got in. It was not that they didn’t admire his courage. But there was nothing he could do here now.

“He wasn’t my father,” said Ashlyme dully. “Why are you burning him? At least his work should be saved! Look, this is his ‘exterior brain’: it’s not by any means an ordinary library.”

“It all has to go,” they repeated patiently. They were used to the protests of the bereaved. “We don’t know what he died of, you see. Alves is in the plague zone now. You want to foot it while you can!”

The plague zone.

A few minutes later Ashlyme stood in the street staring up at the top of the building. A subdued, almost reluctant explosion shook it suddenly, and glass showered down from the penthouse. Strange slow blue flames issued from the upper windows, flames so pale they seemed transparent against the great black bulk of the hill behind.

“This house was always in a plague zone,” said Ashlyme bitterly. “That is why all our schemes came to nothing.”

All at once he was terrified that the same thing might be happening across the city at Audsley King’s house: the thick oil, the smashed windows, the dilatory flames. The only person he could think of who might help him prevent that was the Grand Cairo. He ran off down the hill. When he looked back, the peculiar fire had already lost its force and he could see only a knot of dark figures in the middle of the avenue.

The High City was cold and bright under the colourless moon of autumn. The echo of Ashlyme’s footsteps came back to him changed and muffled, as if from a place a long distance away. We were all accomplices to Buffo’s death, he thought wildly as he ran, we are all to blame. He had no idea what he meant by this, and it gave him no relief. When at last he came to the Grand Cairo’s tower in Montrouge, he was frightened to go in. All its doors and windows hung open in the pitiless light.

Inside, hundreds of the dwarf’s followers had killed each other during the early part of the night. They lay mainly on the stairs and in the corridors between the hastily constructed offices and interrogation rooms, their violent and confused shadows frozen on the walls. They had not had time to prepare. Some of them clutched handfuls of hair pulled out or collars torn off during the fighting; others had knives or razors, or improvised strangling cords; most were bitten about the face and hands. Huge glittering unearthly flies, their energy dulled a little by the cold, went from wound to wound in strict rotation in the bright moonlight, making a dry, desultory buzzing as they rose and fell.

Ashlyme looked at them numbly. He got himself upstairs to a room he recognised from a previous visit, hoping to find someone there who could take him to the Grand Cairo. Attempts had been made to set it on fire. Its occupants had smashed the desk open and soaked their own coats in oil, then applied the charred garments to the flimsy partition wall, which was now full of blackened holes. They had also attempted to burn the documents which spilled out of the fireplace and across the floor. In the end they had given up and killed each other with a paper knife before the flames could take hold. Ashlyme picked up some of the documents.

Day by day our position becomes more precarious… The Barley brothers have named names… We now have a handpicked guard at every gate… He threw them down again, but not before they had set up in his head a kind of hideous drone which followed him from corridor to corridor and staircase to staircase up the tower.

All the offices were the same. From a brass voice pipe Ashlyme thought he heard a whisper, but when he spoke into it there was no answer, only a long echoic sigh. He knew that he was now in the country the dwarf had spoken of so often. Intrigue and backstabbing and great flies in everything you eat. Ashlyme wiped his hand over his face: if he wasn’t careful, he knew, he could be caught there forever. It was a country that accompanied the dwarf wherever he went; it was an atmosphere that surrounded him, miasmic and pervasive, like the smell of Altaean Balm; he had brought it with him, down from the North or the sky, and visited it on the city. Two thousand men were thrown into fires in one day. Those people had abandoned themselves to conspiracy.

Flies rose in clouds as Ashlyme made his way into the older places of the tower. Even there, dead men lay facedown among the orange peel and other rubbish in the gloomy carmine-lit passageways. They had daubed slogans on the walls in their own fluids as they waited to dieUp the North, Ya bas, Go back, yellows -their motives so tribal as to be indistinguishable from motivelessness. We are the boys from the second floor!

A fly settled on his wrist. Its wings were long and papery, and it seemed to have more legs than any fly he had seen in Viriconium. He shuddered and threw it off. Its eyes glittered at him.

Eventually he found his way into the Grand Cairo’s suite, where for a week or more the dwarf, afraid of the plague, afraid of the Barley brothers and their informants who by now knew almost everything, afraid most of all of his own disintegrating gang, had forbidden anyone to enter. The rooms were dirty and cold, and he had allowed his cats (who, he said, were the only creatures you could trust in this life) the run of them. Just inside the door a servant was sprawled. He had been there for some days. Someone had passed a piece of stiff wire through his head from one ear to the other. A thick sour smell rose from the polished floor, where the cats had dragged chop bones and pies from among the broken crockery on the tray he had been carrying and dipped their unfastidious little tongues in the long sticky spill of “housemaid’s coffee.” Ashlyme went to open the windows.

When he looked out, expecting to see the High City stretching away in the moonlight, he discovered that he was staring instead across the bleak watersheds of some high plateau in the North. Rain streamed over it from a leaden sky, washing away at the aimless muddy paths which wound between the foundering cairns and ruined factories. He heard a noise like the far-off ringing of a bell. At this a few small figures appeared, ran this way and that in the mud, and then lay down. A poisonous metallic smell came up into the room. Ashlyme drew in his breath quickly, shut the windows, and turned away.

Two or three cats had run in off the balcony outside, and now accompanied him purring into the salle or side chamber.

White dustcloth hung off the walls in great swathes; underfoot was a muck of chewed bones, bits of cake, and fruit peel, among which Ashlyme saw books, squares of paper covered with designs half-Gnostic, half-obscene, and-to his horror-two small canvases of Audsley King’s: “Making a chair in the Vitelotte Quarter” and an early gouache of “The great arch beneath the Hidden Gate,” the latter slashed and daubed beyond repair. In a corner with some hanks of hair and a rusty spade lay the sheep’s head which had been the centrepiece of the dwarf’s banqueting table on the night he had made Fat Mam Etteilla read his future. He had flung it there in some fit of rage or pique, and now, one withered orange still stuck in its left eye socket, it stared cynically up into the blackened vault of the original room, the rafters of which had received to themselves during the Afternoon Cultures a millennium of strange smokes and incenses.

At the centre of all this stood the Grand Cairo, surrounded by a circle of shrouded furniture.

He had on dark green stockings, and a jerkin made all of green leather lozenges; on his head was a straw hat with a wide brim and a low, rounded crown, surmounted by bunches of owl feathers, ears of corn, and varnished gooseberries. Whatever he had once been, he now seemed to Ashlyme like an ancient, impudent child. In one hand he held tight to something Ashlyme couldn’t quite see; while with the other he clutched the big, work-reddened fingers of the Fat Mam, who cast on him an indulgent, matronly glance. In the Plaza of Unrealised Time she had been known by a voluminous yellow satin gown: she was wearing it now. Ribbons of the same colour were tied loosely about her powerful upper arms, and on her head she bore a wreath of sol d’or.

At their feet she had arranged the five surviving cards of the fortune-telling pack which Ashlyme had pulled from the bonfire of elder boughs and old letters in the walled garden of Audsley King:

DEPOUILLEMENT (Loss) -A bleak foreshore. Creatures of the deep float half submerged in the ebb tide. The sky is full of owls.

THE LILYWHITE BOYS, “Lords of Illusionary Success”-Some pale children jump back and forth like frogs across a fire of sea holly and yew.

THE CITY (Nothingness) -A dog between two towers.

THE LORD OF THE FIRST OPERATION-In this card a monkey in a red jacket directs with his wand the antics of a man and a rat.

ECLAIRCISSEMENT (Enlightenment, or “The Hermetic Feast”)-The doctor of this mystery lies beneath the sea. In one hand he holds a spray of rose hips, in the other a bell.

“What are you doing?” asked Ashlyme in a whisper.

The dwarf gave him a coy smile, then moved his free hand slightly, so as to show him a cake of soap filled with broken razor blades.

“Wait!” cried Ashlyme. Something appalling was going to happen. He flung himself across the room, shouting, “What about Audsley King?”

The fortune-teller raised her hand. The dwarf winked. Out of the tarot cards on the floor came an intense coloured flare of light, as if they had been illuminated suddenly from behind. Ashlyme felt it flash across his face, green and yellow, scarlet and deep blue, like light from a melting stained-glass window. There was an unbearable newness to it as it scoured that ancient room. Ashlyme staggered back.

“Wait!” he cried, flinging up his arm in front of his eyes, but not before he had seen the dwarf and fortune-teller begin to shrink, blasted and shrivelled by that curious glare into bundles of hair and paper ribbon which whirled faster and faster round the floor like rubbish on a windy street corner, until they toppled over suddenly and fell down into the cards with a faint cry.

The room was filled with a white effulgence so intense that he could see, through eyelid and muscle tissue, the bones of his forearm. He groaned and fell heavily on the floor.

When he was able to open his eyes again, he was alone with the cards. They had been scattered and and charred by the force of the light which still radiated from them into every corner of the room. He knelt and collected them together, hissing and blowing on the tips of his fingers. He thought he could see two new figures running between the towers of the card called THE CITY. “Wait!” he whispered, demented with fear and frustration. The light died as abruptly as it had come.

The death and defection of his only allies left him alone in a place he hardly recognised. In one night the plague zone had extended its boundaries by two miles, perhaps three. The High City had succumbed at last. Later he was to write:

A quiet shabbiness seemed to have descended unnoticed on the squares and avenues. Waste paper blew round my legs as I crossed the empty perspectives of the Atteline Way; the bowls of the everlasting fountains at Delpine Square were dry and dust-filled, the flagstones slippery with birdlime underfoot; insectscircled and fell in the orange lamplight along the Camine Auriale. The plague had penetrated everywhere. All evening the salons and drawing rooms of the High City had been haunted by silences, pauses, faux pas: if anyone heard me when I flung myself exhausted against some well-known front door to get my breath it was only as another intrusion, a harsh, lonely sound which relieved briefly the stultified conversation, the unending dinner with its lukewarm sauces and overcooked mutton, or the curiously flat tone of the visiting violinist (who subsequently shook his instrument and complained, “I find the ambience rather unsympathetic tonight.”)

This psychological disorder of the city was reflected in a new disorder of its streets. It was a city I knew and yet I could not find my way about it. Avenue turned into endless avenue. Alleys turned back on themselves. The familiar roads repeated themselves infinitely in rows of dusty chestnut trees and iron railings. If I found my way in the gardens of the Haadenbosk, I lost it again on the Pont des Arts, and ended up looking at my own reflection dissolving in the oily water below. Though the events I had witnessed in the Grand Cairo’s tower had numbed it a little, the grief and shame I felt over my friend’s death was still strong. I struggled too with a rapidly growing fear for the safety of Audsley King. Everyone had deserted her but me. In this way I came eventually-by luck or destiny-to the top of the Gabelline Stairs.

Here he encountered the Barley brothers, Gog and Matey, who came reeling up from the Low City towards him with their arms full of bottles. They had been spitting on the floor all night at Agden Fincher’s pie shop. As soon as they saw Ashlyme bearing down on them they gave him queasy grins and reeled off the way they had come, pushing and shoving one another guiltily and whispering, “Blimey, it’s the vicar!”

But at the bottom of the stairs, near that small iron gate through which Ashlyme would have to pass if he wanted to enter the Low City, they seemed to falter suddenly. They stood in his way, sniffing and hawking and wiping their noses on the backs of their hands.

“Let me through that gate!” panted Ashlyme. “Do you think I want to waste my time with you? Because of you one of my friends is already dead!”

They stared, embarrassed, at the floor.

“Look here, yer honour,” said Matey. “We didn’t know it was Sunday. Sorry.”

As he spoke he furtively used the sole of one turned-down Wellington boot to scrape the foetid clay off the uppers of the other. His brother tried to tidy him up-tugging at his neckerchief, brushing vainly at the mud, fish slime, and rats’ blood congealing on his jacket. A horrible smell came up from him. He looked bashfully away and began to hum,

“Ousted out of Butlins, Bilston, and Mexborough,

Those bold Barley brothers,

Lords of the Left Hand Thread.”

“Are you mad?” demanded Ashlyme.

“We’ve had no supper,” said Gog. He spat on his hand and plastered down his brother’s reeking hair.

Ashlyme thought of Emmet Buffo, who all his life had achieved nothing but ridicule, and who now lay quiet and unshaven, surrounded by pale flames, in the iron bed up at Alves. He thought of Audsley King coughing up blood in the overcast light of the deserted studio above the Rue Serpolet. He thought of Paulinus Rack’s greed, the trivial lives of Livio Fognet and Angina Desformes, the frustrated intelligence of the Marchioness “L,” which had trickled away into scandal and “art.”

“If you are indeed the gods of this place,” he said, “you have done it nothing but harm.” He made a gesture which encompassed the whole city. “Don’t you see?” he appealed. “When you came down from the sky you failed us all. I have lost count of the times when you have been dragged spewing and helpless from the Pleasure Canal! It is not the behaviour of gods or princes. And while you occupy yourselves thus, you condemn us all to waste and mediocrity, madness and disorder, misery and an early death!”

He stared into their big sheepish blue eyes.

“Is this what you want? If you do, you have become worthless, and we are better off without you!”

To begin with the Barley brothers made a great show of paying attention to this speech. A nod was as good as a wink to them, implied the one; while by means of agitated grimaces, groans, and shrugs, the other tried to convey that he too knew when things had got out of hand. Easily bored, though, they were soon trying to put Ashlyme off-imitating his facial expressions, spluttering and sniggering at unfortunate turns of phrase, pushing one another furtively when they thought he wasn’t looking. In the end, even as he was urging them, “Go back to your proper place in the sky before it is too late!” they eyed each other slyly and let fall a resounding succession of belches and farts.

“Gor!” cried Matey. “What a roaster!”

“Hang on! Hang on!” warned his brother. “Here comes another one!”

A foul smell drifted up the Gabelline Stairs.

Ashlyme bit his lip. Suddenly there welled up in him all the misery he had felt since his failure to rescue Audsley King. With an incoherent shout he flung himself at his tormentors, clutching at their coats and punching out blindly. Overcome with farts and helpless laughter they staggered back away from him. He heard himself sobbing with frustration. “You filthy stupid boys!” he wept. He plucked at their arms and tried to twist his fingers in their stubbly hair; he kicked their shins, which only made them laugh more loudly. He didn’t know how to hurt them. Then he remembered the little knife the dwarf had given him. Panting and shaking, he tugged it from his pocket and held it out in front of him.

At this a curious change came over the Barley brothers. Their cruel laughter died. They regarded Ashlyme in horror and amazement. Then, blubbering with a fear quite out of proportion to their plight, they began to run aimlessly this way and that, waving their arms in a placatory and disorganised fashion. Penned into that cramped space which is neither High City nor Low, they made no attempt to escape up the staircase but only jostled one another desperately as Ashlyme chased them round and round, the flawed blade of the Grand Cairo’s mysterious knife glinting in the light from above.

“Come on, vicar!” they urged him. “Play the white man!”

They blundered into the walls; they crashed into the gate and shook it wildly, but it wouldn’t budge. Round and round they went. Their great red faces were dripping with sweat, their eyes were wide, and small, panicky sounds came out of their sagging, open mouths: and for some reason he was never able to explain, this display of weakness only offended Ashlyme further, so that he pursued them with a renewed vigour, a kind of disgusted excitement, round in circles until he was as confused and dizzy as they were.

Matey Barley, tottering about in the gloom, bumped into his brother, jumped away with a yelp of surprise, and ran straight onto the little knife.

“Ooh,” he said. “That hurt.”

He looked down at himself. A quick, artless smile of disbelief crossed his great big fat face, which then collapsed like an empty bag, and he started to sob gently, as if he had glimpsed in that instant the implications of his condition. He sank to his knees, his eyes fixed on Ashlyme in perplexity and awe; he took Ashlyme’s bloody hand and cradled it tenderly between his own; a shiver passed through him, and he farted suddenly into the total apprehensive silence of the Gabelline Stairs. “Make us a pie, Fincher!” he whispered. Then he fell on his face and was still.

Fixed in an instant of violent expectancy, Ashlyme had no clear idea of what he had done. He would force things to a conclusion. “Quick!” he demanded of the remaining brother. “You must now accept the responsibilities of your state!” His grip on the knife became so urgent that cramps and spasms shook his upper body. “Tell me why you brought us all to this! Or shall I kill you, too?”

Gog Barley drew himself up with sudden dignity.

“The citizens are responsible for the state of the city,” he said. “If you had only asked yourselves what was the matter with the city, all would have been well. Audsley King would have been healed. Art would have been made whole. The energy of the Low City would have been released and the High City freed from the thrall of its mediocrity.”

He hiccuped mournfully. “Now my brother lies dead upon this stair, and you must heal yourselves.” He bent down and began raking through the bottles he had dropped earlier.

Ashlyme was disgusted, but could find nothing adequate to say. “Will she die, then, despite everything?” he whispered to himself. And then, in a feeble attempt to rekindle his authority, “You have not said enough!” Gog Barley received this remark with a look of contempt. “Besides,” said Ashlyme, cowed, “I did not mean to kill him. I’ve been with that damned dwarf too long.”

“Matey was me brother!” cried Gog. He had not been able to find a full bottle. “He was me only brother!”

All intelligence deserted him. He tore his hair. He stamped his feet. He let his huge mouth gape open. He raged about in front of the iron gate, picking up bottles and smashing them against the walls where in happier times he and his brother had scratched their initials. Grinding his clumsy fists into his eyes, he roared and wept and howled his grief. And as his tears rolled down they seemed to dissolve the flesh of his cheeks, so that his tormented face shifted and changed before Ashlyme’s astonished eyes.

His shapeless nose was washed away, his cheekbones melted and flowed away, as did his raw red ears and the pimples on his stubbly chin-his chin itself melted away like a piece of waterlogged soap. Faster and faster the tears welled up over his chapped knuckles, until they were a rivulet-a torrent-a waterfall which splashed down his barrel chest, cascaded over his feet, and rushed off into an unimaginable outer darkness, cleansing the god in him of the reek of dead fish and stale wine, of all the filth he had accumulated during his long sojourn in the city. So much water was needed to achieve this that it rose round Ashlyme’s ankles in a black stream, full of dangerous eddies and bearing a burden of small objects washed from the god’s pockets. Ashlyme bent down and dropped his knife into the stream. It was swallowed up, and he never saw it again. He dabbled his bloody hand until it was clean. At last everything earthly was washed away or else irretrievably changed. Gog Barley’s filthy coat and boots were washed away on the flood: and when all was done, it could be seen that he had renewed himself completely.

He was taller. His limbs, as pliable as wax under the force of his own tears, had lengthened and taken on more-noble proportions. His hair had grown until it fell about his shoulders like a true god’s, framing a face which had become slender, hawk-nosed, and finely wrought, a face full of power and humility, blessed with remote, compassionate, and faintly amused eyes.

But long before this transfiguration had completed itself, Ashlyme had shrugged and turned his back on it. What had the suffering of a god to do with him? He waded the little stream, which was gurgling into the Low City, and went out through the iron gate into the Artists’ Quarter.

When he looked back he could see nothing but darkness on the Gabelline Stairs, and above that only cold flickering blue flames, as if the whole of Mynned had now been set on fire by the plague police in some grand final act of despair.

A little later he saw that his boots were quite dry. With a groan he remembered Audsley King.

He began to run.

The hour before dawn found him in the studio above the Rue Serpolet.

A cold air spilled into it as he pushed aside the curtain at the end of the little passage. He saw straight away that it had not changed. There was the fauteuil, with its disordered green chenille cover and piles of brocade cushions. There were the windowsill pots, full of geraniums in hard brown earth, or small bunches of cut anemones and sol d’or. There were the silent easels, some draped, the used and unused canvases stacked against the walls, the bare grey floorboards which gave off into the still, enervated air a faint odour of dust, turpentine, geraniums, old flower water.

Paulinus Rack sat there on the floor in his overcoat. How he had found his way there Ashlyme didn’t know. His face was slack and haggard, his hands were dirty; his eyes had a bruised look. Spread out in front of him tentatively, as if he hoped to read something from them, he had two or three unfinished charcoal sketches. Ashlyme could make nothing of them: they were all lines, lines going this way and that. Cradled between Rack’s thighs like a sick child, and also facing the sketches, sat Audsley King. Rack’s arms were wrapped round her hollow chest to comfort her; his head rested on her shoulder as though he had just that moment stopped whispering to her.

Audsley King, bundled up in her old fur coat in a last attempt to stop her substance evaporating off into the void which had always surrounded her, was staring at the sketches with a wry, amused expression, and there was blood caked in the corner of her smile.

“I was free!” Ashlyme recalled her saying once, of her arrival in the Artists’ Quarter from the provinces. “I was free at last, to paint, paint, paint!”

Now painting had finally exhausted her.

She had worked desperately in those last few days, filling canvas after canvas. Most of them were simple, almost sentimental, remembered views: golden dreamy colour put down thickly with a palette knife, as-in a kind of fervid tranquillity, an astonishing balancing act of desperation and calm-she sought to recapture a level of her personality she had lost or abandoned long ago. Or had she only wanted refuge from the empty, stretched-out nights of the plague zone? The fortune-teller’s cards had failed her: in opening this other door, onto the idealised landscapes of her youth, had she committed after all that act of escapism she had always so despised? Ashlyme could not be sure. He supposed that now it did not matter.

Honey-coloured stone, oak and ivy, willows and streams. Her delight poured out of them, paling the yellow lamps, overpowering the first grey suggestions of the coming dawn! A narrow road wound nowhere, choked with last year’s leaves, banked with brambles and the overgrown boles of trees. Nostalgia burned out of the flat southern landscapes like a pain. And she had peopled them not with the tense, repressed, violently static figures of the self-portraits and “fantasies,” but with labourers and farm people, into whose classic postures she had injected a haunted repose.

Everything is new to me, she had scrawled hastily with a piece of charcoal on the wall above them. New or unrecognisable. What a pity I should die now. And: To die is as if one’s eyes had been put out. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and gone.

Ashlyme read this message aloud to himself. He blinked. He passed in front of Paulinus Rack and looked down at the sketches on the floor.

“What do you see there that’s so interesting?” he asked, for he could see nothing. Rack’s exhausted blue eyes followed him without recognition, like the eyes of a china figure in his slack face. Suddenly there issued from his mouth an appalling noise, a low wail in which Ashlyme could discern no words; and he began to rock Audsley King to and fro, to and fro, until for an instant she seemed to reawaken and nod in time to his harsh, rhythmic sobbing. A parody of her old energy filled the thin white face; made voracious again the lines round the mouth; and animated the long hands which had been so full of power.

Ashlyme couldn’t bear Rack’s grief. He went to the window.

“You came here too late,” he said distantly. “It’s no good making that noise.”

It was almost dawn, and the sky had a queer, greyish-yellow caste.

“What right have you to be here anyway?” He laughed bitterly. “Did you come to save your career with her new paintings? Or persuade her to turn The Dreaming Boys into something ‘a little more cheerful’ for the lazy old women of the High City?”

“I don’t care if I never see those women again!” shouted Rack violently. He jumped up and grabbed Ashlyme by the shoulders. “I tried so many times to come here! I was afraid, but you wouldn’t help me. At least leave us alone together now!”

Ashlyme sneered and pulled himself away.

“Go to the Pleasure Canal and sniff aether until you fall in,” he said.

“Won’t you help me?” Rack asked him in a softer voice. “I believe she’s still alive.”

“You’re mad, Rack.”

Together they carried her down into the Rue Serpolet. It was not the kind of work they were used to, so they went slowly and carefully. Outside on the pavement a crowd of people had gathered to stare into the sky. When Ashlyme looked up it was dawn and he could see the two huge princes of the city hanging in the air above the Artists’ Quarter, resplendent in their horned and lobed scarlet armour. Mounted on vast white horses, they moved through the morning sky like a new constellation. One of those princes has a wound which will never heal. His blood falls from it as a rain of white flowers onto the city beneath: which even now begins to waken from its long, grey, debilitating dream.