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 telclass="underline" 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.