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.
EPILOGUE
One day a long time afterwards, when Ashlyme was looking through a drawer for some pencils he thought he’d put there, he came across the fish’s-head mask Emmet Buffo had made him wear during their doomed visit to the Rue Serpolet. He was no longer quite so afraid of it as he had been. “Absurd thing!” he thought, while for its part it eyed him lugubriously enough-fat-lipped, stupid, shedding scales. It filled him with a kind of ashamed affection for Buffo, and for himself as he had been then. It reminded him suddenly of cod and saffron, of a bright morning in the cisPontine Quarter, and the old man who lived behind “Our Lady of the Zincsmiths.” He decided he would take it back where it belonged.