“Ah!” whispered Mammy Vooley, and sat forward expectantly.
She was already late; but she waved her attendants away when for the third time they brought her the wig and the wooden crown.
“Was it necessary to come here so publicly?” muttered Crome.
The woman with the insect’s head was silent. When that morning he had asked her, “Where would you go if you could leave this city?” she had answered, “On a ship.” And, when he stared at her, added, “In the night. I would find my father.”
But now she only said,
“Hush. Hush now. You will not be here long.”
A crowd had been gathering all afternoon by the wide steps of the observatory. Ever since Mammy Vooley’s arrival in the city it had been customary for “sides” of young boys to dance on these steps on a certain day in November, in front of the gaunt wooden images of the Analeptic Kings. Everything was ready. Candles thickened the air with the smell of fat. The kings had been brought out, and now loomed inert in the gathering darkness, their immense defaced heads lumpish and threatening. The choir could be heard from inside the observatory, practising and coughing, practising and coughing, under that dull cracked dome which absorbs every echo like felt. The little boys-they were seven or eight years old-huddled together on the seeping stones, pale and grave in their outlandish costumes. They were coughing, too, in the dampness that creeps down every winter from the Antedaraus.
“This weapon is making me ill,” said Crome. “What must I do? Where is she?”
“Hush.”
At last the dancers were allowed to take their places about halfway up the steps, where they stood in a line looking nervously at one another until the music signalled them to begin. The choir was marshalled, and sang its famous “Renunciative” cantos, above which rose the whine of the cor anglais and the thudding of a large flat drum. The little boys revolved slowly in simple, strict figures, with expressions inturned and languid. For every two paces forward, it had been decreed, they must take two back.
Soon Mammy Vooley was pushed into view at the top of the steps, in a chair with four iron wheels. Her head lolled against its curved back. Attendants surrounded her immediately, young men and women in stiff embroidered robes who after a perfunctory bow set about ordering her wisp of hair or arranging her feet on a padded stool. They held a huge book up in front of her single milky eye and then placed in her lap the crown or wreath of woven yew twigs which she would later throw to the dancing boys. Throughout the dance she stared uninterestedly up into the sky, but as soon as it was finished and they had helped her to sit up she proclaimed in a distant yet eager voice:
“Even these were humbled.”
She made them open the book in front of her again, at a different page. She had brought it with her from the North.
“Even these kings were made to bend the knee,” she read.
The crowd cheered.
She was unable after all to throw the wreath, although her hands picked disconnectedly at it for some seconds. In the end it was enough for her to let it slip out of her lap and fall among the boys, who scrambled with solemn faces down the observatory steps after it while her attendants showered them with crystallised geranium petals and other coloured sweets, and in the crowd their parents urged them, “Quick now!”
The rain came on in earnest, putting out some of the candles; the wreath rolled about on the bottom step like a coin set spinning on a table in the Luitpold Cafe, then toppled over and was still. The quickest boy had claimed it, Mammy Vooley’s head had fallen to one side again, and they were preparing to close the great doors behind her, when shouting and commotion broke out in the observatory itself and a preposterous figure in a yellow satin shirt burst onto the steps near her chair. It was Ansel Verdigris. He had spewed black-currant gin down his chest, and his coxcomb, now dishevelled and lax, was plastered across his sweating forehead like a smear of blood. He still clutched under one arm the painting he had taken from Crome’s room: this he began to wave about in the air above his head with both hands, so strenuously that the frame broke and the canvas flapped loose from it.
“Wait!” he shouted.
The woman with the insect’s head gave a great sideways jump of surprise, like a horse. She stared at Verdigris for a second as if she didn’t know what to do, then pushed Crome in the back with the flat of her hand.
“Now!” she hissed urgently. “Go and kill her now or it will be too late!”
“What?” said Crome.
As he fumbled at the hilt of the weapon, poison seemed to flow up his arm and into his neck. Whitish motes leaked out of the front of his coat and, stinking of the ashpit, wobbled heavily past his face up into the damp air. The people nearest him moved away sharply, their expressions puzzled and nervous.
“Plotters are abroad,” Ansel Verdigris was shouting, “in this very crowd!”
He looked for some confirmation from the inert figure of Mammy Vooley, but she ignored him and only gazed exhaustedly into space while the rain turned the bread crumbs in her lap to paste. He squealed with terror and threw the painting on the floor.
“People stared at this picture,” he said. He kicked it. “They knelt in front of it. They have dug up an old weapon and wait now to kill the Mammy!”
He sobbed. He caught sight of Crome.
“Him!” he shouted. “There! There!”
“What has he done?” whispered Crome.
He dragged the sword out from under his coat and threw away its sheath. The crowd fell back immediately, some of them gasping and retching at its smell. Crome ran up the steps holding it out awkwardly in front of him, and hit Ansel Verdigris on the head with it. Buzzing dully, it cut down through the front of Verdigris’s skull, then, deflected by the bridge of his nose, skidded off the bony orbit of the eye and hacked into his shoulder. His knees buckled and his arm on that side fell off. He went to pick it up and then changed his mind, glaring angrily at Crome instead and working the glistening white bones of his jaw. “Bugger,” he said. “Ur.” He marched unsteadily about at the top of the steps, laughing and pointing at his own head.
“I wanted this,” he said thickly to the crowd. “It’s just what I wanted!” Eventually he stumbled over the painting, fell down the steps with his remaining arm swinging out loosely, and was still.
Crome turned round and tried to hit Mammy Vooley with the weapon, but he found that it had gone out like a wet firework. Only the ceramic hilt was left-blackened, stinking of fish, giving out a few grey motes which moved around feebly and soon died. When he saw this he was so relieved that he sat down. An enormous tiredness seemed to have settled in the back of his neck. Realising that they were safe, Mammy Vooley’s attendants rushed out of the observatory and dragged him to his feet again. One of the first to reach him was the woman with the insect’s head.
“I suppose I’ll be sent to the arena now,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged.
“The thing seems to be stuck to my hand,” he told her. “Do you know anything about it? How to get it off?”
But it was his hand, he found, that was at fault. It had swollen into a thick clubbed mass the colour of overcooked mutton, in which the hilt of the weapon was now embedded. He could just see part of it protruding. If he shook his arm, waves of numbness came up it; it did no good anyway, he couldn’t let go.
“I hated my rooms,” he said. “But I wish I was back in them now.”
“I was betrayed, too, you know,” she said.
Later, while two women supported her head, Mammy Vooley peered into Crome’s face as if trying to remember where she had seen him before. She was trembling, he noticed, with fear or rage. Her eye was filmed and watery, and a smell of stale food came up out of her lap. He expected her to say something to him but she only looked, and after a short time signed to the women to push her away. “I forgive all my subjects,” she announced to the crowd. “Even this one.” As an afterthought she added, “Good news! Henceforth this city will be called Vira Co, ‘the City in the Waste.’ ” Then she had the choir brought forward. As he was led away Crome heard it strike up “Ou lou lou,” that ancient song: