The old paved square was exactly as he remembered it. If it was not so warm, then it was just as sunny: the pale clear light of a late-December afternoon slanted across the cobbles and lapped the blackened hulk of the old church. The children, as before, were playing noisily at “blind Michael,” and Ashlyme could hear the women laughing and squabbling in the houses. He felt suddenly elated, though he couldn’t have explained why.
SELLER, announced the partly obliterated sign above the old man’s shop. Ashlyme stood for a moment smiling into its small dusty window, where a ray of sun had warmed the fur of the stuffed animals until it was the colour of newly fallen oak leaves, then went inside.
Birds, stiff and silent, watched him from every shelf, their heads cocked forever intelligently on one side, their eyes made of glass. The workroom at the back had the sweet, woody smell of old books and chamomile tea. Ashlyme picked his way between bales of rag to the bottom of the stairs.
“Hello?” he called.
There was no answer, but he sensed the old man was up there: alert, shy, breathing shallowly and waiting for him to go away. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I came here once with your friend Emmet Buffo.”
Silence.
Ashlyme shrugged. If he waited quietly the old man’s curiosity would bring him down. Perhaps he would have another metal feather. Meanwhile he took out the fish’s-head mask and unfolded it carefully. He put it down on a workbench next to the soft wire armature which would one day support the outstretched wings of a little hawk with furious eyes.
“Old man? I cannot stay for long…”
Wrinkling his nose, he turned over some of the rags on the floor. Among them he found a bit of heavily worked tapestry which he thought might do as a curtain. He unfolded it nervously, having learned his lesson from the last one he had picked up. It was stained yet luminous; it had been splendid once. It showed a man in the extreme yellow of age, as bald as an egg, walking between two huge buildings. The road under his feet was carpeted with the crushed husks of insects, and a shadowy figure accompanied him on his left side, a child or a dwarf mounted on a donkey. This figure, its face partly obscured by dirt, fascinated Ashlyme. He lifted the tapestry to the light so that he could see it better.
As he did so there came a loud clatter of wings from the room upstairs. Suddenly the shop seemed to be full of shadows.
A large bird had flown in through an open window, he wrote later in his journal. I thought I heard a reedy voice speak indistinctly in the gloom. I put the tapestry down and walked quickly out into the sunshine.
THE LAMIA amp; LORD CROMIS
The apologists or historians of the city-Verdigris, Kubin, Saent Saar- tended to describe it at that time in terms of its emblems and emblematic contradictions. An ace in the gutter, a leopard made of flowers, says Verdigris in Some Remarks to My Dog, hoping to suggest a whole comprised of hints, causal lacunae, reversing hierarchies: Where the city is at its emptiest we find ourselves full.
For Saent Saar, comfortable under the patronage of a marchioness, this was more than enough. Less desperate perhaps, and more aware of a kind of slippage in the city’s perception of itself, certainly more conscious of his responsibilities, he has it that we see in her very failures of sense a twinning of contingency and the urge to form. The city is inventing herself, in locutions partial and accidental, like a woman rehearsing the contents of an old letter. She lost it long ago. She may even have forgotten who it came from. If she were to see it now, its careful phrases would surprise her by their lack of resemblance to what she has made of them.
Such a view, as acceptable to the Artists’ Quarter as to Mynned, would have been regarded in the provinces with fear. There they looked to the capital, which they called “Uriconium,” “Vriko,” or sometimes “the Jewel on the Edge of the Western Sea,” for stability. One of its minor princes learned the irony of this at first hand. His name was tegeus-Cromis.
He arrived at Duirinish-then a thriving fish-and-wool town on the coast a hundred miles north of the city-towards the end of December, and after making enquiries at a secondhand bookshop and a taxidermist’s, went in the evening to the Blue Metal Discovery, where he sat down in the long smoky parlour at a table some way from the fire. It turned out that he had come by horse, through the Monar passes, which at that time of the year were beginning to be icy and difficult. One or two of his fellow customers knew this; they shook their heads admiringly. One or two more, who thought they knew why he had come, watched him circumspectly while the wind drove sleet across the bleak cobbles of Replica Square. The rest-rentiers, small landowners from the Low Leedale, coming men in the fur and metal trade-watched him simply because he was a minor prince and they had never seen one before.
It had been a raw afternoon and he looked cold. Otherwise it was hard to know what to make of him. He wore a sword but carried a book (The Hunting of the Jolly Wren). While he walked quickly and energetically, like a young man, when you got close you saw he was grey-haired and preoccupied, and for a moment this was unnerving. In the end they would have put it that though the steel rings on his fingers were bulky, aristocratic, cut into the very complex seals of his House, his boots were a bit cheap and dirty. They wouldn’t have expected a prince’s boots to be like that.
They asked him would he come nearer the fire. There was plenty of room!
But if he struck them as lonely, even diffident, he was also as perfectly unresponsive as only a minor prince can be. They were interested in him, but he was not so interested in them; they soon left him to himself, tall and polite in a heavy bice velvet cloak. Evening wore into night and he smiled faintly at the remains of his meal. He seemed to be waiting for someone.
(He was thinking: Last December I watched the early snow fall in the High City. That morning, when it looked as if the weather would improve, I sat in the Charcuterie Vivien hoping the sun would come out. Someone I had been expecting arrived, or spoke, or smiled. We were to go skating the next day if it froze. Moments like this seemed permanent but they cannot be repaired; I cannot now regenerate them. And that is not to go back very far.)
Just after midnight a boy came down from the upper rooms of the inn and began to go round from group to group in the parlour, laughing and talking animatedly. Little notice was taken of him. As far as the prince could tell he was trying to collect money-a strange, graceless-looking child fourteen or fifteen years old, who could reach out very quickly and catch a moth in one hand, then release it unharmed. Every lamp had ten or a dozen of these creatures, with their dark green and purple wings, circling it frantically: the boy was able to perform his trick again and again. At the fire they affected not to see him, though he caught a moth for each of them. They seemed uncomfortable.
“Well,” said the boy loudly at last. “No one born today will ever be drowned or hanged, that’s something.”
Though he didn’t understand the joke of this, the prince found himself laughing. A moment later the boy came over to speak to him.
“Look, watch the moth.”
“You don’t seem to have had much luck over there,” said tegeus-Cromis when he had examined the insect; he found that he could catch it quite easily, but not without breaking its wings. “Still, they’re a careful lot in the fur and metal trade.”
The boy looked at him oddly, then he laughed too.
“Oh, they all know me,” he said. “They all know me, my lord.”