When he unwrapped it to find out he discovered the hacked-off head of an insect, rotting and seeping and fully eighteen inches from eye to globular eye.
He dropped it with a groan and fled, through the warrens behind Delphin Square, past the grubby silent booth of Fat Main Etteilla and the crumbling cornices of the Camine Auriale, his feet echoing down the empty colonnades, his wounds aching in the cold. Things pass behind me when my head is turned, he thought, and he knew then that the future was stalking him; that a consummation lay in ambush. He stared wildly up at the Name Stars in case they should reflect the huge unnatural change below. From Delphin all the way to the Plaza of Unrealized Time he went, straight as an arrow across the Artists'Quarter to the narrow opening of the Rue Sepile, to those worm-eaten rooms on the lower landing with the ceilings that creaked all night…
… Where the dawn found him out at last and his eighty year exile ended (although he was not to know that at the time).
All night he had lain in a painful daze broken by short violent dreams and fevers in which he received hints and rumours of the World's end. Fire shot from the ruined observatory at Alves, and a great bell tolled where none had hung for millenia. A woman with an insect's head stuffed his wounds with sand; later, she led him through unfamiliar colonnades scoured by a hot dry wind – the streets crackled underfoot, carpeted with dying yellow locusts! Main Etteilla, sweating in the prophetic booth – 'Fear death from the air!'- opened her hands palm upwards and placed them on the table. He was abandoned by his companions in the deep wastes and crawled about groaning while the Earth flew apart like an old bronze flywheel under the wan eye of a moon which resolved itself finally into the face of his boy, impassive in the queasy light of a single candle.
'What, then?'he whispered, trying to push the lad away.
It was the last hour of the night, when the light creeps up between the shutters and spreads across the damp plaster like a stain, musty and cold. Outside, the Rue Sepile lay exhausted, prostrate, smelling of stale wine. He coughed and sat up, the sheets beneath him stiff with his own coagulating blood. Pulling himself, hand over hand, out of the hole of sleep, he found his mouth dry and rancid, his injured side a hollow pod of pain.
'There are people to see you,'said the boy. And, indeed, behind his expressionless face other faces swam, there in the corner beyond the candlelight. Hornwrack shuddered, clawing at the bloody linen.
'Do nothing,'he croaked.
The boy smiled and touched his arm, with 'Better get up my lord,'the gesture ambivalent, the smile holding compassion perhaps, perhaps contempt; affection or embarrassment. They knew nothing about one another despite a hundred mornings like this, years of stiff and bloody sheets, delirium, hot water and the stitching needle. How many wounds had the boy bound, with pinched face and capable undemonstrative fingers? How many days had he spent alone with the dry smell of the geraniums, the Rue Sepile 'buzzing beyond the shutters, waiting to hear of a death?
'Better get up. '
'Will you remember me?'
He shivered, and his hand found the boy's thin shoulder. 'Will you remember me?'he repeated, and when no answer was forthcoming swung his legs over the edge of the bed.
'I'm coming,'he said with a shrug; so they waited for him in the shadows of his room, silent and attentive as the boy bathed and dressed his wounds, as the candle faded and grey light crept in under the door. Fay Glass the madwoman with her message from the North; Alstath Fulthor, lord of the Reborn and a great power in Viriconium since the War of the Two Queens; and between them the old bent man in the hooded robe, who peered out through a chink in the mouldy shutter and said dryly, 'I can connect nothing with nothing today. But look how the leaves fall!'
3: A Fish Eagle in Viriconium
Tomb the Dwarf's return to Viriconium, his adoptive city, was accomplished at no great pace. The passage of two or three days placed the site of his abortive excavations and near-incineration behind him to the south-east. The Monar massif was on his right hand (its peaks as yet no more than a threat of ice, a white hanging frieze hardly distinguishable from a line of cloud), while somewhere off to his left ran that ancient, paved and – above all – crowded way which links the Pastel City with its eastern dependencies – Faldich, Cladich and Lendalfoot by the sea. This latter route he avoided, preferring the old drove-roads and greenways, out of sentimentality rather than any conscious desire to be alone. He remembered something about them from his youth. Although he was not quite sure what it might be, he sought it stubbornly in the aimless salients and gentle swells of the dissected limestone uplands which skirt the mountains proper, haunted by the liquid bubble of the curlew and the hiss of the wind in the blue moor-grass.
He gave little thought to his rescuer from the past. The man had vanished again while he slept, leaving nothing but a half-dream in which the words 'Viriconium'and 'Moon'were repeated many times and with a certain sense of urgency. (Tomb had woken ravenous in the morning, abandoned the new pit immediately, despite its promise, and gone in search of him – full at first of a curious joy, then at least in hope; and finally when he failed to find so much as a footprint in the newly-turned earth, with a wry amusement at his own folly.) He was, as he had put it more than once, a dwarf and not a philosopher. Events involved him utterly; he encountered them with optimism and countered them with instinct; in their wake he had few opinions, only memories. He asked for no explanations.
Still, curiosity was by no means dead in him; and since he could not go to the Moon he moved west across the uplands instead, toward Viriconium, In a region of winding dales a further queer event overtook him.
Fissuring the high plateau, so that from above it looked like a grey and eroded cheese, these deep little dry-bottomed valleys were dreamy and untenanted. Hanging thickets of thorn and ash made them difficult of access (except where some greenway deserted impulsively its grassy sheep-run to follow an empty stream bed, plunge through tumbled and overgrown intake walls, and nose like a dog among the mossy ruins of some long-abandoned village): and each was guarded by high, white, limestone bastions. Into one such came the dwarf at the end of a warmish October afternoon, the wheels of his caravan creaking on a disused track drifted with ochre leaves. Reluctant to disturb the elegant silence of the beechwoods, he descended slowly, looking for a place to pass the night. The air was warm, the valley dappled with honey-coloured light. Summer still lived here in the smell of the wild garlic, the dance of the insects in the steep glades, and the slow fall of a leaf through a slanting ray of sun.
The curves of the track revealed to him first a forgotten hamlet in the valley floor – then, swimming above that in a kind of amber glow, the enormous cliff which dominated it.
The village was long dead. Past it once had flowed a stream called the Cressbrook: but there was no-one left now to call it anything, and it had retreated shyly underground leaving only a barren strip of stones to separate the relics of human architecture from the vast limestone cathedral on its far bank. There was no water for his ponies, but Tomb turned them out of their shafts anyway; he felt magnetized, drawn, on the verge of some discovery. For this they bore him no more or less ill-will than usual, and he could hear them tearing at the damp grass as he pottered along the bank of the vanished brook. But he couldn't get comfortable 'there, or amid the contorted and lichenous boughs of the reverted orchard with its minute sour apples – and after a while he shook his head, staring puzzledly about him. Something had attracted him, and yet the place was nothing more than a collection of bramble-filled intakes, grassy mounds, and heaps of stone colonized by nettle and elderberry, its air of desuetude and loss magnified by the existence of the cliff above -That cliff! That aching expanse of stone, with its ancient jackdaw colonies, its great ragged swathes of ivy and its long mysterious yellow stains! It hung up there, every line of it precise in the amber glow, every scalloped overhang thick with brown darkness, every leaning ash tree, golden and exact against its own black shadow. Every buttress was luminous. The gloomy and suggestive caves worn in its face by a million years of running water seemed more likely places of habitude than the pitiful handful of relics facing it across the dry stream: the shadow of a bird, flickering for a moment across an acre of vibrant white stone, invested it with some immemorial yet transitory significance (some distillation or heirloom of a thousand twilights, a billion such shadows fossilized impalpably in the rock): it was like a vast old head – imperial, ironic and compelling -Eventually he cooked himself a meal and ate it squatting comfortably on the step of the caravan. Smoke from his fire became trapped in the inversion layers and drifted down the little valley. Evening came closer and yet never seemed to arrive – as if the valley and its great white guardian were removed from the ordinary passage of time. The sun dipped forever into the greyness and yet never sank. The air cooled, but so slowly. No wind came. Tomb the Dwarf scratched his crotch, yawned. He stood up to massage the deep ache of an old back-wound.