Viriconium

THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE

The city has always been full of little strips and triangles of unused land. A row of buildings falls down in Chenaniaguine-the ground is cleared for further use-elder and nettle spring up-nothing is ever built. Or else the New Men set aside some park for a municipal estate, then quarrel among themselves: a few shallow trenches and low brick courses are covered in a season by couch grass and “fat hen.” Allman’s Heath, bounded on two sides by empty warehouses, an abattoir, and a quarantine hospital, and on its third by a derelict reach of the canal, looks like any of them.

A few houses stare morosely at it from the city side of the canal. The people who live in them believe that insects the size of horses infest the heath. Nobody has ever seen one; nevertheless, once a year the large wax effigy of a locust, freshly varnished and with a knot of reed grasses in its mouth, is brought out from the houses and paraded up and down the towpath. In the background of this ceremony the heath seems to stretch away forever. It is the same if you go and look from the deserted pens of the cattle market, or one of the windows of the old hospital. To walk round it takes about an hour.

Every winter years ago, little girls would chalk the ground for “blind Michael” in a courtyard off the Plaza of Realised Time. (It was on the left as you came to the Plain Moon Cafe, where even in February the tables were arranged on the pavement, their planished copper tops gleaming in the weak sun. You turned down by an ornamental apple tree.) Generally they were the illegitimate children of midinettes, laundry women who worked in Minnet-Saba, or the tradesmen from the Rivelin market. They preserved a fierce independence and wore short stiff blouses which bared the hollow of their backs to the grimmest weather. If you approached them properly, one of them would always tuck her chalk down her white drawers, lick the snot off her upper lip, and lead you to Orves; it was hard work to keep up with her in the steep winding streets.

Most sightseers changed their minds as soon as they saw the shadow of the observatory falling across the houses, and went back to drink hot genever in the Plain Moon. Those who kept on under the black velvet banners of the New Men, which in those days hung heavily from every second-floor window, would find themselves on the bank of the canal at Allman’s Reach.

There was not much to see. The cottages were often boarded up at that time of year. A few withered dock plants lined the water’s edge where the towpath had collapsed. No one was in sight. The wind from the heath made your eyes water until you turned away and found the girl standing quite still next to you, her hands hanging at her sides. She would hardly look at you, or the heath; she might glance at her feet. If you offered her money she would scratch her behind, screech with laughter, and run off down the hill. Later you might see her kneeling on the pavement in some other part of the Quarter, the wet chalk in her mouth, staring with a devout expression at something she had drawn.

Vera Ghillera, Vriko’s immortal ballerina, had herself taken to Allman’s Reach the day she arrived in the city from Sour Bridge. She was still a provincial and not more than a child herself, as thin and fierce and naive as any of them in the courtyard off the plaza, but determined to succeed; long in the muscle for classical dance, perhaps, but with a control already formidable and a sharp technical sense. It was the end of a winter afternoon when she got there. She stood away from her guide and looked over the canal. After a minute her eyes narrowed as if she could see something moving a great distance away. “Wait,” she said. “Can you? No. It’s gone.” The sun was red across the ice. Long before the city knew her lyrical port de bras, she knew the city. Long, long before she crossed the canal she had seen Allman’s Heath and acknowledged it.

Everyone has read how Vera Ghillera, choreographed by Madame Chevigne, costumed by Audsley King, and dancing against sets designed by Paulinus Rack from sketches attributed to Ens Laurin Ashlyme, achieved overnight fame at the Prospekt Theatre as “Lucky Parminta” in The Little Humpbacked Horse; how she was courted by Rack and Ingo Lympany amongst others, but did not marry; and how she kept her place as principal dancer for forty years despite the incurable fugues which compelled her to attend regularly and in secret the asylum at Wergs.

Less of her early life is public. In her autobiography The Constant Imago, she is not frank about her illness or how it came about. And few of her contemporaries were ever aware of the helplessness of her infatuation with Egon Rhys, leader of the Blue Anemone Ontological Association.

Rhys was the son of a trader in fruit and vegetables at Rivelin-one of those big, equivocally natured women whose voice or temper dominate the Market Quarter for years on end, and whose absence leaves it muted and empty. He had been in and out of the market since her death, a man enclosed, not much used to the ordinary emotions, not interested in anything but his own life. He tended to act in good faith.

He was shorter than Vera Ghillera. As a boy, first selling crystallised flowers round the combat rings, then as the apprentice of Osgerby Practal, he had learned to walk with a shambling gait which diverted attention from his natural balance and energy. This he retained. (Later in life, though his limbs thickened, his energy seemed to increase rather than abate-at seventy, they said, he could hardly stand still to talk to you.) He had large hands and a habit of looking at them intently, with a kind of amused indulgence, as if he wanted to see what they would do next.

His heavy, pleasant face was already well-known about the rings when Vera came to the city. Under the aegis of the Blue Anemone he had killed forty men. As a result the other “mutual” associations often arranged a truce among themselves in order to bring about his death. The Feverfew Anschluss had a special interest in this, as did the Fourth of October and the Fish-Head Men from Austonley. At times even his relations with the Anemone were difficult. He took it calmly, affecting an air of amusement which-as in other notorious bravos-seems to have masked not anxiety but an indifference of which he was rather ashamed, and which in itself sometimes frightened him. He let himself be seen about the Quarter unaccompanied, and walked openly about in the High City, where Vera first observed him from an upper room.

The Little Humpbacked Horse was history by then: she had carried a lamp in Mariana Natesby, overcome with furious concentration the debilitating danse d’ecole work and formalism of Lympany’s The Ginger Boy. She had danced with de Cuevas, then past the height of his powers, and been his lover; she had had her portrait painted once a year for the oleo-graph trade, as “Delphine,” “Manalas,” and-looking over a parapet or smiling mysteriously under a hat-as the unnamed girl in The Fire Last Wednesday at Lowth. She had got her full growth. At work, though she was so tall, her body seemed compacted, pulled in on itself like the spring of a humane killer: but she looked exhausted when the makeup came off, and somehow underfed as she slumped awkwardly, legs apart, on a low chair in her sweat-stained practice clothes. She had forgotten how to sit. She was “all professional deformity in body and soul.” Her huge eyes gave you their attention until she thought you were looking at someone else, then became blank and tired.

She never lost her determination, but an unease had come over her.

In the morning before practice she could be seen in the workmen’s cafes down by the market, huddled and fragile-looking in an expensive woollen coat. She listened to the sad-sounding traders’ calls in the early fog, hearing them as remote, and as urgent as the cries of lookouts in the bows of a ship. “Two fathoms and shelving!” She watched the girls playing blind Michael in the courtyard off the Plaza of Realised Time, but as soon as they recognised her walked quickly away. “One fathom!”

The first time she saw Egon Rhys she ran down into the street without thinking and found him face to face with two or three members of the Yellow Paper College. It was a fraught moment; razors were already out in the weird Minnet-Saba light, which lay across the paving stones the colour of mercury. Rhys had his back to some iron railings, and a line of blood ran vertically down his jaw from a nick under one eye.

“Leave that man alone!” she said. At ten years old in the depressed towns of the Midland Levels she had seen unemployed boys fighting quietly under the bridges, building fires on waste ground. “Can’t you find anything better to do?”

Rhys stared at her in astonishment and jumped over the railings.

“Don’t ask me who she was,” he said later in the Dryad’s Saddle. “I legged it out of there faster than you could say, right through someone’s front garden. They’re hard fuckers, those Yellow Paper Men.” He touched the cut they had given him. “I think they’ve chipped my cheekbone.”

He laughed.

“Don’t ask me anything!”

But after that, Vera seemed to be everywhere. He had quick glimpses of a white face with heavily made-up eyes among the crowds that filled the Market Quarter at the close of every short winter afternoon. He thought he saw her in the audience at the ring behind the Dryad’s Saddle. (She was blinking in the fumes from the naphtha lamps.) Later she followed him from venue to venue in the city and brought him great bunches of sol d’or whenever he won.

With the flowerboys she sent her name, and tickets to the Prospekt Theatre. There he was irritated by the orchestra, confused by the constant changes of scene, and embarrassed by the revealing costumes of the dancers. The smell of dust and sweat and the thud of their feet on the stage spoiled the illusion for him: he had always understood dancing to be graceful. When Vera had him brought up to her dressing room afterwards, he found her wearing an old silk practice top rotting away under the arms, and a pair of loose, threadbare woollen stockings out of which someone had cut the feet. “I have to keep my calves warm,” she explained when she caught him staring at them. He was horrified by the negligent way she sprawled, watching him intently in the mirrors, and he thought her face seemed as hard and tired as a man’s; he left as soon as he could.

Vera went home and stood irresolutely near her bed. The geranium on the windowsill was like an artificial flower on a curved stem, its white petals more or less transparent as the clouds covered and uncovered the moon. She imagined saying to him,

“You smell of geraniums.”

She began to buy him the latest novels. Just then, too, a new kind of music was being played everywhere, so she took him to concerts. She commissioned Ens Laurin Ashlyme to paint his portrait. He couldn’t be bothered to read, he said; he listened distractedly to the whine of the cor anglais, then stared over his shoulder all evening as if he had seen someone he knew; he frightened the artist by showing him how good an edge his palette knife would take. “Don’t send so many flowers,” he told her. Nothing she could offer seemed to interest him, not even his own notoriety.

Then he watched a cynical turn called Insects at the Allotrope Cabaret in Cheminor. One of the props used in this was a large yellow locust. When they first dragged it onto the cramped Allotrope stage it appeared to be a clever waxwork. But soon it moved, and even waved one of its hands, and the audience discovered among the trembling antennae and gauze wings a naked woman, painted with wax, lying on her back with her knees raised to stimulate the bent rear legs of the insect. She wore to represent its head a stylised, highly varnished mask. Fascinated, Rhys leaned forward to get a better view. Vera heard his breath go in with a hiss. He said loudly, “What’s that? What is that animal?” People began to laugh at his enthusiasm; they couldn’t see that the double entendre of the act meant nothing to him. “Does anyone know?” he asked them.

“Hush!” said Vera. “You’re spoiling it for everyone else.”

Poor lighting and a smell of stale food made the Allotrope a cheerless place to perform; it was cold. The woman in the insect mask, having first adjusted it on her shoulders so that it would face the audience when she did, stood up and made the best she could of an “expressive” dance, crossing and uncrossing her thick forearms in front of her while her breath steamed into the chilly air and her feet slapped one two three, one two three on the unchalked boards. But Rhys would not leave until the bitter end, when the mask came off and under it was revealed the triumphant smile, disarranged chestnut hair, and tired puffy face of some local artiste hardly sixteen years old, to whistles of delight.

Outside, their shadows fell huge and black on the wall that runs, covered with peeling political cartoons, the length of Endingall Street. “It doesn’t seem much to stand in front of an audience for,” said Vera, imitating the barren, oppressive little steps. “I would be frightened to go on.” She shuddered sympathetically. “Did you see her poor ankles?”

Rhys made an impatient gesture.

“I thought it was very artistic,” he said. Then: “That animal! Do things like that exist anymore?”

Vera laughed.

“Go on Allman’s Heath and see for yourself. Isn’t that where you’re supposed to go to see them? What would you do if you were face to face with it now? A thing as big as that?”

He caught her hands to stop her from dancing. “I’d kill it,” he said seriously. “I’d-” What he might do he had to think for a moment, staring into Vera’s face. She stood dead still. “Perhaps it would kill me,” he said wonderingly. “I never thought. I never thought things like that might really exist.” He was shivering with excitement: she could feel it through his hands. She looked down at him. He was as thick-necked and excitable as a little pony. All of a sudden she was sharply aware of his life, which had somehow assembled for itself like a lot of eccentric furniture the long perspective of Endingall Street, the open doors of the Allotrope Cabaret, that helpless danseuse with her overblocked shoes and ruined ankles, to what end he couldn’t see.

“Nothing could kill you,” she said shyly.

Rhys shrugged and turned away.

For a week or two after that she seemed to be able to forget him. The weather turned wet and mild; the ordinary vigour of their lives kept them apart.

His relations with the Blue Anemone had never been more equivocal: factions were out for him in High City and Low. If Vera had known he was so hard put to it in the alleys and waste ground around Chenaniaguine and Lowth, who can say what she might have done. Luckily, while he ran for it with an open razor in one hand and a bunch of dirty bandages coming unravelled from the other, she was at the barre ten hours a day for her technique. Lympany had a new production, Whole Air: it would be a new kind of ballet, he believed. Everyone was excited by the idea, but it would mean technique, technique, technique. “The surface is dead!” he urged his dancers: “Surface is only the visible part of technique!”

Ever since she came up from the midlands, Vera had hated rest days. At the end of them she was left sleepless and irritated in her skin, and as she lay in bed the city sent granular smoky fingers in through her skylight, unsettling her and luring her out so that late at night she had to go to the arena and, hollow-eyed, watch the clowns. There while thinking about something else she remembered Rhys again, so completely and suddenly that he went across her-snap-like a crack in glass. Above the arena the air was purple with roman candles bursting, and by their urgent intermittent light she saw him quite clearly standing in Endingall Street, shivering in the grip of his own enthusiasm, driven yet balked by it like all nervous animals. She also remembered the locust of the Allotrope Cabaret. She thought,

“Artistic!”

Though on a good night you could still hear the breathy whisper of twenty-five thousand voices wash across the pantile roofs of Montrouge like a kind of invisible firework, the arena by then was really little more than a great big outdoor circus, and all the old burnings and quarterings had given place to acrobatics, horse racing, trapeze acts, etc. The New Men liked exotic animals. They did not seem to execute their political opponents-or each other-in public, though some of the aerial acts looked like murder. Every night there was a big, stupid lizard or a megatherium brought in to blink harmlessly and even a bit sadly up at the crowd until they had convinced themselves of its rapacity. And there were more fireworks than ever: to a blast of maroons full of magnesium and a broad falling curtain of cerium rain, the clowns would erupt bounding and cartwheeling into the circular sandy space-jumping up, falling down, building unsteady pyramids, standing nine or ten high on one another’s shoulders, active and erratic as grasshoppers in the sun. They fought, with rubber knives and whitewash. They wore huge shoes. Vera loved them.

The greatest clown of his day, called by the crowd “Kiss-O-Suck,” was a dwarf of whose real name no one was sure. Some people knew him as “Morgante,” others as “Rotgob” or “The Grand Pan.” His legs were frail looking and twisted, but he was a fierce gymnast, often able to perform four separate somersaults in the air before landing bent-kneed, feet planted wide apart, rock steady in the black sand. He would alternate cartwheels with handsprings at such a speed he seemed to be two dwarfs, while the crowd egged him on with whistles and cheers. He always ended his act by reciting verses he had made up himself:

Codpoorlie-tah

Codpoorrrlie- tah!

Codpoorlie-tah! tah! tah!

Dog pit.

Dog pit pooley

Dog pit pooley

Dog pit have-a-rat tah tah tah

(ta ta.)

For a time his vogue was so great he became a celebrity on the Unter-Main-Kai, where he drank with the intellectuals and minor princes in the Bistro Californium, strutted up and down in a padded doublet of red velvet with long scalloped sleeves, and had himself painted as “The Lord of Misrule.” He bought a large house in Montrouge.

He had come originally from the hot bone-white hinterlands of the Mingulay Littoral, where the caravans seem to float like yellow birdcages at midday across the violet lakes of the mirage “while inside them women consult feverishly their grubby packs of cards.” If you are born in that desert, its inhabitants often boast, you know all deserts. Kiss-O-Suck was not born a dwarf but chose it as his career, having himself confined for many years in the black oak box, the gloottokoma, so as to stunt his growth. Now he was at the peak of his powers. When he motioned peremptorily, the other clowns sprang up into the air around him. His voice echoed to Vera over the arena. “Dog pit pooley!” he chanted, and the crowd gave it him back: but Vera, still somehow on Endingall Street with Egon Rhys trembling beside her, heard, “Born in a desert, knows all deserts!” The next day she sent him her name with a great bunch of anemones. I admire your act. They met in secret in Montrouge.

At the Bistro Californium, Ansel Verdigris, poet of the city, lay with his head sideways on the table; a smell of lemon gin rose from the tablecloth bunched up under his cheek. Some way away from him sat the Marquis de M-, pretending to write a letter. They had quarrelled earlier, ostensibly about the signifier and the signified, and then Verdigris had tried to eat his glass. At that time of night everyone else was at the arena. Without them the Californium was only a few chairs and tables someone had arranged for no good reason under the famous frescoes. De M- would have gone to the arena himself, but it was cold outside with small flakes of snow falling through the lights on the Unter-Main-Kai. Discovering this about itself, he wrote, the place seems stunned and quiet. It has no inner resources.

Egon Rhys came in with Vera, who was saying:

“-was sure he could be here.”

She pulled her coat anxiously about her. Rhys made her sit where it was warm. “I’m tired tonight,” she said. “Aren’t you?” As she crossed the threshold she had looked up and seen a child’s face smile obliquely out at her from a grimy patch in the frescoes. “I’m tired.” All day long, she complained, it had been the port de bras: Lympany wanted something different-something that had never been done before. “ ‘A new kind of port de bras’!” she mimicked, “ ‘A whole new way of dancing’! But I have to be so careful in the cold. You can hurt yourself if you work too hard in weather like this.”

She would drink only tea, which at the Californium is always served in wide china cups as thin and transparent as a baby’s ear. When she had had some, she sat back with a laugh. “I feel better now!”

“He’s late,” said Rhys.

Vera took his arm and pressed her cheek briefly against his shoulder.

“You’re so warm! When you were young did you ever touch a cat or a dog just to feel how warm it was? I did. I used to think: It’s alive! It’s alive!”

When he didn’t respond she added, “In two or three days’ time you could have exactly what you want. Don’t be impatient.”

“It’s already midnight.”

She let his arm go.

“He was so sure he would be here. We lose nothing if we wait.”

There things rested. Fifteen minutes passed, perhaps half an hour; de M-, certain now that Verdigris was only pretending to be asleep to taunt him, crumpled a sheet of paper suddenly and dropped it on the floor. At this Rhys, whose affairs had made him nervous, jumped to his feet. The Marquis’s mouth dropped open weakly. When nothing else happened Rhys sat down again. He thought, After all, I’m as safe here as anyone else in the city. He was still wary, though, of the poet, whom he thought he recognised. Vera glanced once or twice at the frescoes (they were old; no one could agree on what was represented), then quickly down at her cup. All this time Kiss-O-Suck the dwarf had been sitting slumped on a corner of the mantelpiece behind them like a great doll someone had put there for effect years before.

His legs dangled. He wore red tights, and yellow shoes with a bell on each toe; his doublet was made of some thick black stuff quilted like a leather shin guard and sewn all over with tiny glass mirrors. Immobility was as acceptable to him as motion: in repose his body would remember the gloottokoma and the hours he had spent there, while his face took on the look of varnished papier-mache, shiny but as if dust had settled in the lines down the side of his hooked nose down to his mouth, which was set in a strange but extraordinarily sweet smile.

He had been watching Vera since she came in. When she repeated eventually, “He was so sure he could be here,” he whispered to himself: “I was! Oh, I was!” A moment later he jumped down off the mantelpiece and blew lightly in Egon Rhys’s ear.

Rhys threw himself across the room, smashing into the tables as he tried to get at his razor which he kept tucked up the sleeve of his coat. He fetched up against the Marquis de M- and screamed, “Get out of the fucking way!” But the Marquis could only stare and tremble, so they rocked together for a moment, breathing into one another’s faces, until another table went over. Rhys, who was beginning to have no idea where he was, knocked de M- down and stood over him. “Don’t kill me,” said de M-. The razor, Rhys found, was tangled up with the silk lining of his sleeve: in the end he got two fingers into the seam and ripped the whole lot down from the elbow so that the weapon tumbled out already open, flickering in the light. Up went Rhys’s arm, with the razor swinging at the end of it, high in the air.

“Stop!” shouted Vera. “Stop that!”

Rhys stared about him in confusion; blinked. By now he was trembling, too. When he saw the dwarf laughing at him he realised what had happened. He let the Marquis go. “I’m sorry,” he said absentmindedly. He went over to where Kiss-O-Suck had planted himself rock steady on his bent legs in the middle of the floor, and caught hold of his wrist.

“What if I cut your face for that?” he asked, stroking the dwarf’s cheek as if to calm him down. “Here. Or say here. What if I did that?”

The dwarf seemed to consider it. Suddenly his little wrist slipped and wriggled in Rhys’s grip like a fish; however hard Rhys held on, it only twisted and wriggled harder, until he had let go of it almost without knowing. (All night after that his fingers tingled as if they had been rubbed with sand.)

“I don’t think she would like that,” said Kiss-O-Suck. “She wouldn’t like you to cut someone as small as me.”

He shrieked; slapped Rhys’s face; jumped backwards from where he stood, without so much as a twitch of intent, right over the table and into the hearth. Out of his doublet he brought a small jam jar which he put down in the centre of the table. It contained half a dozen grasshoppers, a grey colour, with yellowish legs. At first they were immobile, but the firelight dancing on the glass around them seemed to invigorate them, and after a moment or two they started to hop about in the jar at random.

“Look!” said the dwarf.

“Aren’t they lively?” cried Vera.

She smiled with delight. The dwarf chuckled. They were so pleased with themselves that eventually Egon Rhys was forced to laugh too. He tucked his razor back up his sleeve and stuffed the lining in after it as best he could. Thereafter strips of red silk hung down round his wrist, and he sometimes held the seam together with his fingers. “You must be careful with that,” said Vera. When she tapped the side of their jar, one or two of the grasshoppers seemed to stare at her seriously for a moment, their enigmatic, horsey little heads quite still, before they renewed their efforts to get out, popping and ticking against the lid.

“I love them!” she said, which made Egon Rhys look sidelong at the dwarf and laugh even louder. “I love them! Don’t you?”

The Marquis watched incredulously. He got himself to his feet and with a look at Ansel Verdigris as if to say “This is all your fault” ran out onto the Unter-Main-Kai. A little later Rhys, Vera, and the dwarf followed. They were still laughing; Vera and Rhys were arm in arm. As they went out into the night, Verdigris, who really had been asleep, woke up.

“Fuck off, then,” he sneered. His dreams had been confused.

The day they crossed the canal they were followed all the way up to Allman’s Reach from the Plain Moon Cafe. The mutual associations were out: it was another truce. Rhys could distinguish the whistles of the Fish-Head Men, January the Twelfth, the Yellow Paper College (now openly calling itself a “schism” of the Anemone and publishing its own broad-sheet from the back room of a pie shop behind Red Hart Lane). This time, he was afraid, the Anemone was out too. He had no credit anywhere. At Orves he made the dwarf watch one side of the road while he watched the other. “Pay most attention to doorways.” Faces appeared briefly in the cobbled mouths of alleys. Vera Ghillera shivered and pulled the hood of her cloak round her face.

“Don’t speak,” warned Egon Rhys.

He had a second razor with him, one which he no longer used much. That morning he had thought, It’s old but it will do, and taken it down off the dusty windowsill where it lay-its handle as yellow as bone-between a ring of his mother’s and a glass of cloudy water through which the light seemed to come suddenly when he picked it up.

Though he was careful to walk with his hands turned in to the sides of his body in such a way as to provoke no one, he had all the way up the hill a curious repeating image of himself as somebody who had already run mad with the two razors-hurtling after his enemies across the icy treacherous setts while they stumbled into dark corners or flung themselves over rotting fences, sprinting from one feeble refuge to another. “I’ll pen them up,” he planned, “in the observatory. They won’t stop me now. Those bastards from Austonley.. .” It was almost as if he had done it. He seemed to be watching himself from somewhere behind his own back; he could hear himself yelling as he went for them, a winter gleam at the end of each wildly swinging arm.

“We’ll see what happens then,” he said aloud, and the dwarf glanced up at him in surprise. “We’ll see what happens then.” But the observatory came and went and nothing happened at all.

By then some of the Austonley men were no longer bothering to hide, swaggering along instead with broad grins. Other factions soon fell in with them, until they formed a loose, companionable half circle ten or fifteen yards back along the steep street. Their breath mingled in the cold air, and after a few minutes there was even some laughter and conversation between the different parties. As soon as they saw he was listening to them they came right up to Rhys’s heels, watching his hands warily and nudging each other. The Yellow Paper kept itself apart from this: there was no sign of the Anemone at all. Otherwise it was like a holiday.

Someone touched his shoulder and, stepping deftly away in the same movement, asked him in a soft voice hardly older than a boy’s, “Still got that old ivory bugger of Osgerby’s up your sleeve, Egon? That old slasher of Osgerby Practal’s?”

“Still got her there, have you?” repeated someone else.

“Let’s have a look at her, Egon.”

Rhys shrugged with fear and contempt.

It was bitterly cold on the canal bank. Vera stood listening to the rush of the broken weir a hundred yards up the reach. Sprays of scarlet rose hips hung over the water like necklaces tossed into the frozen air; a wren was bobbing and dipping among the dry reeds and withered dock plants beneath them.

“I can’t see what such a little thing would find to eat,” she said. “Can you?” No one answered.

The sound of the weir echoed off the boarded-up housefronts. Men from a dozen splinter groups and minor factions now filled the end of the lane to Orves, sealing it off. More were arriving all the time. They scraped heavily to and fro on the cinder path, avoiding the icy puddles, blowing into their cupped hands for warmth, giving Rhys quick shy looks as if to say, “We’re going to have you this time.” Some were sent to block the towpath. Presently the representatives of the Blue Anemone Ontological Association came out of one of the houses, where they had spent the morning playing black-and-red in a single flat ray of light which slanted between the boards and fell on a wooden chair. They had some trouble with the door.

Rhys brandished his razors at them.

“Where’s the sense in this? Orcer Pust’s a month dead; I put Ingarden down there with him not four nights ago-where was the sense in that?”

Sense was not at issue, they said.

“How many of you will I get before you get me?”

The representatives of the Anemone shrugged. It was all one to them.

“Come on, then! Come on!” Rhys shouted to the bravos in the lane. “I can see some bastards I know over there. How would they like it? In the eyes? In the neck? Facedown in the bathhouse tank with Orcer Pust?”

Kiss-O-Suck the dwarf sat down suddenly and unlaced his boots. When he had rolled his voluminous black trousers up as far as they would go he made a comical face and stepped into the canal, which submerged him to the thighs. He then waded out a few yards, turned round, and said quietly to Rhys, “As far as they’re concerned you’re as good as dead already.” Further out, where it was deeper, probing gingerly in the mud with his toes, he added, “You’re as good as dead on Allman’s Heath.” He slipped: swayed for a moment: waved his arms. “Oops.” Shivering and blowing he climbed out onto the other side and began to rub his legs vigorously. “Foo. That’s cold. Foo. Tah.” He called, “Why should they fight when they’ve only to make sure you go across?”

Rhys stared at him, then at the men from the Anemone. “You were none of you anything until I pulled you out of the gutter,” he told them. He ran his hands through his hair.

When it was Vera’s turn, the water was so cold she thought it would stop her heart.

Elder grew in thickets on the edge of the heath as if some attempt at habitation had been made a long time ago. Immediately you got in among it, Vriko began to seem quiet and distant; the rush of the weir died away. There were low mounds overgrown with nettle and matted couch grass; great brittle white-brown stems of cow parsley followed the line of a foundation or a wall; here and there a hole had been scraped by the dogs that swam over in the night from the city-bits of broken porcelain lay revealed in the soft black soil. Where brambles had colonised the open ground, water could be heard beneath them, trickling away from the canal down narrow aimless runnels and trenches.

It was hard for the dwarf to force his way through this stuff, and after about half an hour he fell on his back in a short rectangular pit like an empty cistern, from which he stared up sightlessly for a moment with arms and legs rigid in some sort of paralytic fit. “Get me out,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “Pull me out.”

Later he admitted to Vera:

“When I was a boy in the gloottokoma I would sometimes wake in the dark not knowing if it was night or day, or where I was, or what period of my life I was in. I could have been a baby in an unlit caravan. Or had I already become Kiss-O-Suck, Morgante, ‘the Grand Little Man with the crowd in the palm of his hand’? It was impossible to tell: my ambitions were so clear to me, my disorientation so complete.”

“I could never get enough to eat,” said Vera. “Until I was ten years old I ate and ate.”

The dwarf looked at her whitely for a moment.

“Anyway, that was how it felt,” he said, “to live in a box. What a blaze of light when you were able to open the lid!”

Elder soon gave way to stands of emaciated birch in a region of shallow valleys and long spurs between which the streams ran in beds of honey-coloured stone as even as formal paving; a few oaks grew in sheltered positions among boulders the size of houses on an old alluvial bench. “It seems so empty!” said Vera. The dwarf laughed. “In the South they would call this the ‘plaza,’ ” he boasted.

“If they knew about it they’d come here for their holidays.” But after a mile or so of rising ground they reached the edge of a plateau, heavily dissected into a fringe of peaty gullies each with steep black sides above a trickle of orange water. Stones like bits of tile littered the watershed, sorted into curious polygonal arrays by the frost. There was no respite from the wind that blew across it. And though when you looked back you could still see Vriko, it seemed to be fifteen or twenty miles away, a handful of spires tiny and indistinct under a setting sun.

“This is more like it,” said Kiss-O-Suck.

Egon Rhys blundered across the entangled grain of the watershed, one peat hag to the next, until it brought him to a standstill. The very inconclusiveness of his encounter with his rivals, perhaps, had exhausted him. He showed no interest in his surroundings, but whenever she would let him he leaned on Vera’s arm, describing to her as if she had never been there the Allotrope Cabaret-how pretty its little danseuse had been, how artistically she had danced, how well she had counterfeited an animal he had never imagined could exist. “I was amazed!” he kept saying. Every so often he stood still and looked down at his clothes as though he wondered how they had got dirty. “At least try and help yourself,” said Vera, who thought he was ill.

The moment it got dark he was asleep; but he must have heard Kiss-O-SUCK talking in the night because he woke up and said,

“In the market when my mother was alive it was always, ‘Run and fetch a box of sugared anemones. Run, Egon, and fetch it now.’ ” Just when he seemed to have gone back to sleep again, his mouth hanging open and his head on one side, he began repeating with a kind of infantile resentment and melancholy, “ ‘Run and fetch it now! Run and fetch it now! Run and fetch it now!’ ”

He laughed.

In the morning, when he opened his eyes and saw he was on Allman’s Heath, he remembered none of this. “Look!” he said, pulling Vera to her feet. “Just look at it!” He was already quivering with excitement.

“Did you ever feel the wind so cold?”

A cindery plain stretched level and uninterrupted to the horizon, smelling faintly of the rubbish pit on a wet day. The light that came and went across it was like the light falling through rainwater in empty tins, and the city could no longer be seen, even in the distance. To start with it was loose uncompacted stuff, ploughed up at every step to reveal just beneath the surface millions of bits of small rusty machinery like the insides of clocks; but soon it became as hard and grey as the sky, so that Vera could hardly tell where cinders left off and air began.

Rhys strode along energetically. He made the dwarf tell him about the other deserts he had visited. How big were they? What animals had he seen there? He would listen for a minute or two to the dwarf’s answers, then say with satisfaction, “None of those places were as cold as this, I expect,” or: “You get an albino sloth in the South, I’ve heard.” Then, stopping to pick up what looked like a very long thin spring, coiled on itself with such brittle delicacy it must have been the remains of some terrific but fragile dragonfly: “What do you think of this, as a sign? I mean, from your experience?” The dwarf, who had not slept well, was silent.

“I could go on walking forever!” Rhys exclaimed, throwing the spring into the air. But later he seemed to tire again, and he complained that they had walked all day for nothing. He looked intently at the dwarf.

“How do you explain that?”

“What I care about,” the dwarf said, “is having a piss.” He walked off a little way and gasping with satisfaction sent a thick yellow stream into the ground. “Foo!” Afterwards he poked the cinders with his foot and said, “It takes it up, this stuff. Look at that. You could water it all day and never tell. Hallo, I think I can see something growing there already! Dwarfs are more fertile than ordinary people.” (That night he sat awake again, slumped sideways, his arms wrapped round his tucked-up knees, watching Vera Ghillera with an unidentifiable expression on his face. When he happened to look beyond her, or feel the wind on his back, he shuddered and closed his eyes.)

“When I first saw you,” Vera told Egon Rhys, “you had cut your cheek. Do you remember? A line of blood ran down, and at the end of it I could see one perfect drop ready to fall.”

“That excited you, did it?”

She stared at him.

He turned away in annoyance and studied the heath. They had been on it now for perhaps three, perhaps four days. He had welcomed the effort, and gone to sleep worn out; he had woken up optimistic and been disappointed. Nothing was moving. The dwarf did not seem to be able to give him a clear idea of what to look for. He had thought sometimes that he could see something out of the corner of his eye, but this was only a kind of rapid, persistent fibrillating movement, never so much an insect as its ghost or preliminary illusion. Though at first it had aggravated him, now that it was wearing off he wished it would come back.

“My knee was damaged practising to dance Fyokla in The Battenberg Cake. That was chain after chain of the hardest steps Lympany could devise; they left your calves like blocks of wood. It hurt to run down all those stairs to help you.”

“Help me!” jeered Rhys.

“I’m the locust that brought you here,” she said suddenly.

She stood back on the hard cinders. One two three, one two three, she mimicked the poverty-stricken skips and hops which pass for dance at the Allotrope Cabaret, the pain and lassitude of the dancer who performs them. Her feet made a faint dry scraping sound.

“I’m the locust you came to see. After all, it’s as much as she could do.”

Rhys looked alertly from Vera to the dwarf. Ribbons of frayed red silk fluttered from his sleeve in the wind.

“I meant a real insect,” he said. “You knew that before we started.”

“We haven’t been lucky,” Kiss-O-Suck agreed.

When Rhys took hold of his wrist he stood as still and compliant as a small animal and added, “Perhaps we came at the wrong time of year.”

Something had gone out of him: Rhys gazed down into his lined face as if he was trying to recognise what. Then he pushed the dwarf tenderly onto the cinders and knelt over him. He touched each polished cheek, then ran his fingertips in bemusement down the sides of the jaw. He seemed to be about to say something: instead he flicked the razor into his hand with a quick snaky motion so that light shot off the hollow curve of the blade. The dwarf watched it; he nodded. “I’ve never been in a desert in my life,” he admitted. “I made that up for Vera. It sounded more exotic.”

He considered this. “Yet how could I refuse her anything? She’s the greatest dancer in the world.”

“You were the greatest clown,” Rhys said.

He laid the flat of the razor delicately against the dwarf’s cheekbone, just under the eye, where there were faint veins in a net beneath the skin.

“I believed all that.”

Kiss-O-Suck’s eyes were china-blue. “Wait,” he said. “Look!”

Vera, who had given up trying to imitate locust or danseuse or indeed anything, was en pointe and running chains of steps out across the ash, complicating and recomplicating them in a daze of technique until she felt exactly like one of the ribbons flying from Rhys’s sleeve. It was a release for her, they were always saying at the Prospekt Theatre, to do the most difficult things, all kinds of allegro and batterie bewilderingly entangled, then suddenly the great turning jump forbidden to female dancers for more than a hundred years. As she danced she reduced the distinction between heath and sky. The horizon, never convinced of itself, melted. Vera was left crossing and recrossing a space steadily less definable. A smile came to Kiss-O-Suck’s lips; he pushed the razor away with one fat little hand and cried:

“She’s floating!”

“That won’t help you, you bastard,” Egon Rhys warned him.

He made the great sweeping cut which a week before had driven the razor through the bone and gristle at the base of Toni Ingarden’s throat.

It was a good cut. He liked it so much he let it pass over the dwarf’s head; stopped the weapon dead; and, tossing it from one hand to the other, laughed. The dwarf looked surprised. “Ha!” shouted Rhys. Suddenly he spun round on one bent leg as if he had heard another enemy behind him. He threw himself sideways, cutting out right and left faster than you could see. “And this is how I do it,” he panted, “when it comes down to the really funny business.” The second razor appeared magically in his other hand and between them they parcelled up the emptiness, slashing wildly about with a life of their own while Rhys wobbled and ducked across the surface of the desert with a curious, shuffling, buckle-kneed, bent-elbowed gait. “Now I’ll show you how I can kick!” he called.

But Kiss-O-Suck, who had watched this performance with an interested air, murmuring judicially at some difficult stroke, only smiled and moved away. He had the idea-it had never been done before-to link in sequence a medley of cartwheels, “flying Dementos,” and handsprings, which would bounce him so far into the smoky air of the arena, spinning over and over himself with his knees tucked into his stomach, that eventually he would be able to look down on the crowd, like a firework before it burst. “Tah!” he whispered, as he nerved himself up. “Codpoorlie, tah!”

Soon he and Rhys were floating too, leaping and twirling and wriggling higher and higher, attaining by their efforts a space which had no sense of limit or closure. But Vera Ghillera was always ahead of them, and seemed to generate their rhythm as she went.

Deserts spread to the northeast of the city, and in a wide swathe to its south.

They are of all kinds, from peneplains of disintegrating metallic dust- out of which rise at intervals lines of bony incandescent hills-to localised chemical sumps, deep, tarry, and corrosive, over whose surfaces glitter small flies with papery wings and perhaps a pair of legs too many. These regions are full of old cities which differ from Vriko only in the completeness of their deterioration. The traveller in them may be baked to death, or, discovered with his eyelids frozen together, leave behind only a journal which ends in the middle of a sentence.

The Metal-Salt Marshes, Fenlen Island, the Great Brown Waste: the borders of regions as exotic as this are drawn differently on the maps of competing authorities, but they are at least bounded in the conventional sense. Allman’s Heath, whose borders can be agreed by everyone, does not seem to be. Neither does it seem satisfactory now to say that while those deserts lie outside the city, Allman’s Heath lies within it.

The night was quiet.

Five to eleven, and except where the weir agitated its surface, the canal at Allman’s Reach was covered with the lightest and most fragile web of ice. A strong moon cast its blue and gamboge light across the boarded-up fronts of the houses by the towpath. They don’t look as if much life ever goes on in them, thought the watchman, an unimaginative man at the beginning of his night’s work, which was to walk from there up to the back of the Atteline Quarter (where he could get a cup of tea if he wanted one) and down again. He banged his hands together in the cold. As he stood there he saw three figures wade into the water on the other side of the canal.

They were only ten yards upstream, between him and the weir, and the moonlight fell on them clearly. They were wrapped up in cloaks and hoods, “like brown-paper parcels, or statues tied up in sacks,” he insisted later, and under these garments their bodies seemed to be jerking and writhing in a continual rhythmic motion, though for him it was too disconnected to be called a dance. The new ice parted for them like damp sugar floating on the water. They paid no attention to the watchman, but forded the canal, tallest first, shortest last, and disappeared down the cinder lane which goes via Orves and the observatory to the courtyard near the Plain Moon Cafe.

The watchman rubbed his hands and looked round for a minute or two, as if he expected something else to happen. “Eleven o’clock,” he called at last, and though he couldn’t commit himself to a description which seemed so subject to qualification as to be in bad faith, added: “And all’s all.”